Madani’s recurring cake motif was inspired by a child’s birthday party she witnessed in Tehran, where the festive celebrations seemed to incongruously include businessmen, a PA system and American coloured decorations. This mosh-up of signifiers suggested an interesting parallel for the act of painting itself, conceiving the canvas as a site of contradiction, invention, and fantasy. Pink Cake captures this ambience of surrealism in both its subject and style with her cake-laden brief-clad machismos elucidated by luscious and intuitional mark-making, jumbling delicate washes and fluid lines with glutinous impastos of intoxicatingly saccharine hues.