If you caught one of Kamrooz Aram’s recent shows in New York City, you may well have been so struck by the paintings that you declared them beautiful. If you said the word out loud, he will do his best not to hold it against you.

Aram’s unconventional techniques and materials in his semi-abstract paintings include Islamic geometric patterns destroyed with a squirt bottle of turpentine, which are rebuilt and pasted over with glittery stickers. The range of motifs, from Persian carpets to Super Mario Brothers, reflect his deep connections with both American and Iranian culture.

Aram, who was born in Shiraz but moved to the United States at age eight, remembers little of his early childhood there. (He still likes to mention the city because of its association with roses and poetry.) His memories of Iran are mostly composites of long trips to his grandparents' mud-clay home with a large courtyard, outhouse, and pomegranate tree, where they slept on the roof under mosquito nets.

His aunt, who moved to Arizona and wound up marrying an American with tattoos and a Harley-Davidson, was the first family member to encourage his artistic efforts. She painted herself, and proclaimed that his adolescent snake drawings showed real talent. At 14, Aram started playing the drums in bands with his older brother, playing covers of Led Zeppelin and other rock legends. Later he branched out into songwriting and took up the guitar. After "trying to be Bob Dylan in a more contemporary way" for some years, the band broke up when it came time for college at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore.

Aram is currently preparing for two shows in 2006, at MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in the Berkshires) and at the Wilkinson Gallery in London.

We met recently at St. Helen Cafe in Brooklyn, a hip yet cozy place in a building owned by artist Andrea Zittel with a koi pond, freshly-made ginger ale, and rock music like the Doors playing. The 27-year-old wore a black t-shirt and jeans and spoke with his hands, tracing the table top with his fingertips.

Was there somebody outside the family who encouraged your artistic development early on?

It’s funny how people want to know how it all started. It’s kind of a silly story about me painting an image of a Sicilian woman from a National Geographic magazine cover during a holiday break. I brought it into my art teacher afterward and he jumped up and down. I was 16-year-old kid in high school playing in rock bands. I was more interested in rock posters than I was in making art. I thought I wanted to be a musician. I thought music reaches so many more people.

Which musicians influenced you the most?

One of my biggest heroes is Fela Kuti, a Nigerian musician whose mother was politically active. His parents sent him to London to study medicine, but he decided to study music instead. Eventually he moved to the west coast of the United States. He played with James Brown for a while. He kind of invented Afro pop music. He really embraced Nigeria and specific cultural values. The music is something that my friend recommended, and it’s one of those experiences where you’ve never heard anything like this before. You’re just floored and your life changes. Everything’s different.

What would I see if I was checking out your CD collection?

The same thing you’d see if you saw my friends. In my music collection is everything from jazz and blues to indie rock, reggae, hip hop. Lots of traditional Iranian, traditional Arabic. Italian, Flamenco. All over the place. My friends are Iranians, and Americans, from all over the world. I was really, really into reggae music for a while. In Baltimore, I hung out with a lot of Rastafarians from Jamaica. I had a close friend who was ten years older than me who played guitar and opened my eyes to a lot of things. I connected with these guys because the Rasta religion is so much about politics, so much about spirituality. I think the same could be said about Islam. The religions have much in common, championing the cause of the marginalized, for example.

You were playing with those themes already as an undergrad in your work.

I jumped from making what I thought was art, and meaningful to me, and getting to a place where I thought I was going to be a figurative painter. I’d seen Picasso’s work from when he was a child. When he was 11 years old he was making drawings I dreamed of making when I was 18. I thought the answer was to become a master draftsman. But I realized it was something I would have to do the rest of my life doing—Picasso was a prodigy, and I’m not. I realized it was meaningless to try and do this.

At the end of my second year of college, I was making some weird work that I was very uncomfortable with.

What was weird about it?

I basically rebelled. I remember the moment. I was painting this figure—so sick of it, so tired of it. I started drawing flowers all over it. And I remember the professor came by and saw it, looked at me and shook her head and walked away. I got really upset, because it was so discouraging. For the first time, I was doing something that meant something to me. It made a big difference for the future.

So were you able to find some more supportive mentors?

Oh, yeah. People were very supportive. I got the Javits Fellowship and got into Columbia, which at that time was definitely the most sought-after graduate school for young artists. My professors were really into it. Some of the students were not, they reacted negatively towards it.

Because they were jealous?

There was a lot of jealousy, but also a lot of people thought that I was getting attention through identity politics. I never thought of my work as identify politics. Everybody makes work about who they are.

I thought it was going to function a certain way and it didn’t. Everybody would love it because it was so beautiful. I realized that I am making a contemporary image with these traditional forms, but people are reacting the same way to these paintings they would to a mosque. In a very Orientalist way, like a Persian carpet. “Oh, it’s so beautiful. Let’s drop $20,000 on it.” Not that I was selling my work for that much.

I sold something to a corporate consultant. I didn’t know where it was going until after I sold it. It was about fasting during the month of Ramadan, in an abstract way. I later found out it went to McDonald’s corporate headquarters.

How’d you feel about that?

It drove me crazy! That’s one of the things that made me change my work. People weren’t getting it. A painting that I made in graduate school sold to the State Department. They bought it for the US embassy in Abu Dhabi. I thought, “Here I am being used as this example of how wonderful the West is. Muslim artists can go and be Muslim and have the freedom to make their art and blah blah blah.” It drove me crazy.

Those two things made me realize that, wait, you’re not getting your point across. This is exactly what you don’t want to be doing. People love the work because it’s beautiful.

I really believe that art is so much about the spectacle. If there’s only spectacle, especially in painting, it’s decorative. There’s no meaning. It’s easy to sell, but it doesn’t last as art, historically. If there’s an imbalance and there’s all content and no spectacle, it risks becoming didactic and not visual and almost propaganda. Boring. But if there’s this balance of spectacle and content, which is what I’m trying to do, I feel that spectacle has to be just ahead of the content so that it hits people and then the content comes next.

I couldn’t live with myself making beautiful paintings. It defeated the whole purpose of being an artist. I also had a problem with making work that had a direct meaning. I was always more interested in ambiguity. In asking questions, and not giving any answers. I would never say that I make political work but it would be hard for me to deny that there’s any kind of political questions or implications in it.

What techniques have you explored to help pose those questions?

[I’d] throw brushes at canvas: little explosions, romantic bursts of light, but also physically destroying the canvas. I became fascinated with these explosions. I remember the Iran-Iraq war when we were in Tehran. They would shut out the electricity so the Iraqis couldn’t see the city. My mom would say, “Do you kids want to have a picnic? We’re going to have a picnic downstairs in the basement.” We knew what was going on, but there was this really comforting thing about it being this picnic in the basement. My mom would bring a radio down and turn up the music really loud. We’d still feel a little shaking and hear some explosions. At that point we’d been to the States once in the summer and we’d seen Fourth of July fireworks. I remember talking with my brother about how we thought we saw fireworks outside.

It was funny; I didn’t know really why I was making these explosions. It’s a symmetrical pattern like you might find in the center of a carpet, a decorative explosion. The dripping in the paint started taking different forms—it was dripping down and it was dark and looked like this rotting, bloody mess. I would turn the canvas and drip it up to get light colors.

In Sufipoetry there’s this constant use of imagery of fire, romantic and destructive. The paintings for me always have double meanings. The fireworks, romantic bursts of light, versus a destructive explosion.

The symbols are very personal and potent for you. What kind of reactions do you get from people?

I’m still in the stage where the first reaction when somebody sees my painting is, “Wow, that’s beautiful.” I’m okay with that now. Now I know that there’s more and they can’t ignore it.

The New York Times review in February 2004 begins, “Kamrooz Aram, 25.” The first thing they said, after your name, was how old you were. Is your age relevant to your work?

There’s this whole obsession with young artists. There are a lot of artists, like those in college that I couldn’t relate to, who have nothing to say. But they’re talking really fast. They say that in a lot of hip hop songs, “Talking loud, saying nothing.”

I’m not saying you have to be from a third world country to have anything to say. [Laughs] There are many amazing, important artists that are born and raised in the States and in the same position as me, frustrated by a lot of decorative work that’s getting a lot of attention. It’s like fashion. Work that looks like it could be on the wall of Urban Outfitters.

I’m in the same place in my career as a lot of 35-year-olds. I have to remind myself not to burn out. It’s great that it started early, but if I’m not in the Whitney Biennial this year, or next year, or in five years, it doesn’t really matter. I don’t think it’s what’s important to me, but it’s hard not get caught up in being a part of this system. The art world is a lot more of a scene than people like to pretend.

How do you resist those temptations?

I would be thrilled to be in the Whitney Biennial. It would be great. But I have to remind myself if I’m not, that’s not the point. I’m much more excited about doing this show at MASS MoCA, which is this museum that’s really about the artist and the art, and nothing else.