The Cat Slips Through the Gap in the Door

Gorbe on Masks, Freedom, and the Street as a Living Story — Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Episode 85

A cat that survives the street has a particular set of instincts: it checks everything, waits, watches, and then moves in one motion. It slips through a half-open door and is already gone before anyone notices. Gorbe — graffiti artist, illustrator, and one of the most recognizable figures in Iranian street art — built an entire identity, and an entire philosophy, out of that single image.

In this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri, Gorbe appears the way he always does: behind a cat mask, his real name and face undisclosed, his voice carrying nearly two decades of street art, graffiti, stickers, installations, and character design. What follows is a long, genuinely strange and moving conversation about identity, freedom, fear, and what happens when a character you invented starts asking things of you.

Before the Cat, There Was Everything Else

Gorbe is careful to correct a common assumption early in the conversation: Gorbe did not begin his journey into street art. The cat character is roughly eleven years old, but Gorbe’s history in graffiti and street art stretches back seventeen or eighteen years, beginning in school with a string of earlier names — Carbon, then Nine, then Nico, then Inoosh — each one tested, worn for a while, and abandoned.

The character that would become Gorbe wasn’t born from any grand plan. For a stretch of time, every figure he drew in his notebook turned into a cat, without him fully understanding why. He grew tired of it, tried to move on to a new subject, and instead of discarding the drawings, gave the recurring cat character a name: Nicat — a blend of his own name, Nico, and the fact that it kept showing up as a cat. Nicat sat unused for years until Gorbe finally returned to develop the character seriously, and at that point made a deliberate choice to drop the borrowed-sounding “Nicat” entirely in favor of something rooted in something he understood instinctively: the freedom of street cats, who come at night and leave by morning, answering to no one.

A Name That Works Because It Doesn’t Try

Gorbe is disarmingly honest about his own limitations as a namer. He can design something distinctive, he says, but he cannot pick a good name to save his life — and he knows it. The eventual choice to simply call the character “cat” (gorbe, in Persian) wasn’t a stroke of branding genius. It worked precisely because it didn’t try to be clever. A street cat can do whatever it wants and no one questions it. It can carry a spray can across a rooftop and no one will necessarily connect the artwork back to it. There’s something appealingly unglamorous and anonymous about the name — a face that isn’t familiar, paired with a name that is completely familiar, and the combination, he felt, complemented each other.

A Mask, Not a Costume

Hossein presses on something that sounds simple but turns out to be genuinely unresolved for Gorbe himself: why does any of this require a separate character at all? Why not work under his own name?

Gorbe tried that, for a period, roughly a decade or twelve years ago — before the cat existed in any form. The duality, he says, was there even then, and it has never fully resolved. Sitting in this very conversation, he admits he still doesn’t know, in any given moment, whether he is Gorbe, or the creator of Gorbe, or the narrator telling Gorbe’s story. The boundary moves constantly. Sometimes he is building a character and breathing life into it. Lately, he says, it feels more like the character is the one asking him to keep playing along — to keep giving it life. He doesn’t have a tidy answer for this. He says, simply, that the question gets clearer the longer he keeps doing the work, but it has never fully closed.

“Some days I’m the cat itself,” he says. “Some days I’m its creator. Some days I’m just the narrator of its story. I still don’t have an answer for that.”

The Side of Him He Doesn’t Have the Courage to Be

One of the conversation’s most candid admissions comes when Gorbe explains exactly what the mask allows him to do. If he wants to stand somewhere doing nothing dramatic, he lets the cat take the lead. If he wants to do something a little rude, a little bold, he pushes the cat character forward to do it instead of doing it as himself.

“The cat is the side of my personality,” he says, “that I don’t have the courage to be myself.”

This is not, he clarifies, primarily about privacy. He has no real concern about people knowing his private life. It’s something closer to a working principle borrowed from graffiti culture itself: you stay hidden, and you let the work speak. He wants people to recognize the character he has built — to connect with Gorbe — rather than conflating the artist with the art. Letting his own face become part of the story, he feels, would dilute that.

Anger, Heartbreak, and a Stand-In for Things He Couldn’t Say Directly

Gorbe traces some of the rawest material in his street work back to specific emotional events — heartbreak, in particular. During periods before the cat existed, he describes going through a breakup and then physically returning, can of spray paint in hand, to the exact location where he and that person used to meet, putting a piece up there as a way of saying something he didn’t want to say directly. He compares it to choosing a role and stepping into it: rather than confronting someone face-to-face, he channels the feeling into a character and lets the work carry the message into the world, where the right person might eventually see it.

He describes Gorbe’s underlying backstory in similar terms — a fictional narrative of a cat that lost something significant, carries a deep grief, and develops a rebellious streak after discovering graffiti, eventually needing help from someone resisting “the system” to get through a final, decisive confrontation. It is, he admits with a laugh, partly a video-game logic — a boss fight at the end of a long, complicated story — built from fragments of his own real experience, mixed with imagination.

Why the Street, and Not the Gallery

Asked directly why he never simply became a painter who shows work in galleries, Gorbe’s answer centers on ownership of space and on audience. On the street, you have an entire city beneath your hands, available in any form you choose. You don’t need to ask anyone to come see the work — it exists in plain sight, and whoever passes by becomes the audience, whether they intended to or not.

He describes a specific piece: three painfully realistic illustrations of birds that had been shot, printed on cardboard and pasted in three high-traffic locations around Mashhad, positioned to look as though they had fallen and died exactly there. He set up a hidden camera nearby and watched, in person, how people reacted — some looked and kept walking, some kicked the image and turned back to look again, some stopped to take photos. For Gorbe, that reaction is not a side effect of the work; it is half of the work. Street art, in his formulation, is the piece plus the public’s response, combined.

Plan B, Plan C, and the Discipline Behind the Risk

Beneath the adrenaline and rebellion that outsiders associate with graffiti, Gorbe describes an almost obsessively methodical planning process. Before any high-visibility piece, he maps out who might walk by, where the nearest police checkpoint is, what story he’ll tell if he’s stopped, and what his actual exit route looks like if something goes wrong.

He recounts, in detail, a night in Mashhad when he set out alone to paint a large piece on an iron wall along a major street, carrying a ladder, oil paint, thinner, and a small disguised camera. Before leaving the house, he had already built his cover story — that he was an employee headed to paint curbs in a city park — and prepared a change of clothes stashed near an overpass so he could alter his appearance immediately after finishing. When police did, in fact, stop him around 1 a.m., the prepared story held. He finished the piece, retrieved his hidden camera (narrowly rescuing it from a garbage truck mid-route), changed his appearance on the overpass, and walked home as someone else entirely, having left his tools behind on purpose so nothing could be traced back to him.

“I’m not someone who can improvise in the moment,” he says. “I have to think through all of it beforehand. That’s just not who I am.”

The Genuine Camaraderie of the Street Art Community

One of the threads Hossein returns to repeatedly is the unusual degree of collaboration inside Iran’s street art and graffiti scene — sticker artists working with videographers, musicians pairing with graffiti writers, completely different disciplines merging with ease. Gorbe attributes this to a shared, unpretentious camaraderie: everyone in that world has, in his words, eaten dirt from the same ground. The activities differ, but the underlying experience — risk, exposure, the particular thrill and fear of working in public space — is identical enough to create real closeness.

At the same time, Gorbe pushes back firmly against an outside stereotype he finds reductive: the assumption that graffiti artists must dress a certain way, listen to certain music, perform a certain street persona. He follows traffic laws completely. He dresses plainly. He doesn’t listen to rap. None of that, he insists, has anything to do with whether the work itself is good — and he has felt, at times, that the street itself tried to push him toward a mold he never wanted to fit.

Separating the Person from the Business

As Gorbe’s practice matured, he made a decision that, by his own account, took years to become possible: separating Gorbe the art from a formal studio entity that handles commercial work, contracts, and income. He now works with a manager — his second, after an earlier collaboration ended when his first manager emigrated — specifically so that decision fatigue, logistics, and the constant churn of incoming requests don’t consume the mental space he needs to make work that is genuinely his.

He’s candid about how difficult the balance still is. He describes splitting his time into roughly three competing categories — paid commercial work, his personal life, and Gorbe — and admits that for long stretches, he chose Gorbe over relationships, over rest, over nearly everything else, and that the cost of that choice has been real: friendships that faded, relationships that didn’t survive the imbalance.

“It’s not just financial security the studio gives me,” he says. “It’s mental security — space in my head that isn’t constantly ringing.”

The Dark Cube

Asked where his own cozy corner is — where he experiences his most creative self — Gorbe doesn’t hesitate: a small, dark, enclosed space, ideally with no light at all, or just the glow of a desk lamp or a monitor. There, alone, with music, his mind drifts freely between old insults he once heard, half-forgotten memories, and ideas for the future, until something sparks. He’s specific that this only applies to ideation — once he’s actually executing a piece, his mind wanders elsewhere entirely. A large, bright, window-filled space might be pleasant to live in, he says, but it does nothing for him when it’s time to actually work.

On the Question of Ever Showing His Face

Hossein asks the inevitable question directly: has Gorbe considered a face reveal, retiring the cat, and continuing under his real identity? Gorbe’s answer, for now, is no — though he’s careful to frame it as a current position rather than a permanent one. He has, at times, caught himself instinctively correcting people: I’m not the cat, I’m the cat’s narrator. The cat does its own thing; I just sit here without the mask and tell you I’m the one narrating. Whether that distinction will ever resolve into something simpler, he genuinely doesn’t know.

A Dedication

Asked who he’d like to dedicate this conversation to, Gorbe declines to single out one person. Instead, he dedicates it to everyone who has walked this path alongside him — friends who helped him along the way, and friends he lost along the way, whose dreams didn’t survive the same uncertainty his did — and to anyone considering starting down this same road, with all its strange, unanswered questions. He’s careful to note that he isn’t offering himself as a role model to imitate, only as one example among many: take what’s useful, leave what isn’t, and build your own way through it.