Shoja Azari's latest works, currently showing for the first time in France at Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, address issues of Middle Eastern violence, martyrdom and religious beliefs in a way that may feel like the artist is beating a dead horse. Yet the show nevertheless hints at a deeper failure to address why the horse exists at all.

The Paris exhibition is mostly a reprise of the Iranian-born, U.S.-based artist's New York debut at Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller Gallery last year. A darkened room plays "The Last Day of Judgment." That work consists of a large video canvas superimposing news and YouTube clips of Hezbollah rallies, the whizzing bullets of an assassination in Tehran, and Abu Ghraib guard Lynndie England, projected on the surface famous religious painting "The Day of the Last Judgment" by Mohammad Modabber. The traditional storytelling tapestry is matched with its equivalent modern tenets, using new technology.

This is the most forceful work of the show though it is also frustrating to those who have become desensitized to footage of death rattles, blood on the street, and Israeli house demolitions after more than a decade of newscast bombardment. The work builds a bridge between a Middle Eastern past and present, though, to outsiders, the bridge may already seem quite short. The projection ends with an explosion and a digital fire that engulfs the work and as a whole, the work's main effect is felt when leaving the darkened booth and emerging into the sun-drenched minimalist refinement of de Noirmont's space — an almost guilty escape from the socio-political conundrum of the Arab world that is easier to oversimplify and push aside than to explore.

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Gallerygoers are then challenged to engage with Azari's work through the "Icon" series, consisting of video renderings of the iconic, almost cartoonish, images of anti-Sunni Imams, martyrs, and Islamic saints that have been hung in hundreds of Iranian barber shops, coffee houses and restaurants since the 1979 revolution. Azari removes their historic chauvinism, replacing pious old male faces with those of young women. The artist has suggested that this is an attempt to highlight the unheralded sacrifices of female martyrs, but as he inserts crying eyes and other facial movements into the video images, the effect is also to strip the icons of their dogmatic symbolism, humanizing them and forcing an interaction with the beholder.

All this paves the way for Azari's newest work, an intriguing complementary piece to "The Day of the Last Judgment." Upstairs, a single room accommodates the work that gives the show its title, "There are no non-believers in Hell." The sermon of an American priest who had called for a bonfire for the Qur'an plays as images of flames engulf two Old Master paintings: Rembrandt's "The Sacrifice of Isaac" and Caravaggio's "The Incredulity of Saint Thomas," two carnal and provocative works the strength of whose imagery seems destined to rival, or even outdo that of the Islamic works. From wrestling with the complexities of Islam, the gallerygoer is presented with the most simplistic remedy, espoused by the American right and religious conservatives: fire, and lots of it.

Interpreting the juxtaposition of the anti-Koran speech with Western masterpieces as a mere reminder that both Islam and Christianity have seen fundamentalist abuses would be superficial. Azari rather proposes the ultimate challenge through the piece's title — also the words of the American preacher — which declare that you can eschew these subjects but never escape them.

Azari's commentary reverberates on different levels, most directly and critically to the Arab world, as it engages and questions the religious fervor that underpins much of Iran's official policy and values, and relates it to past and present of both Islamic and Christian faiths. But it also challenges a Western audience to look beyond the piecemeal renditions of Middle Eastern beliefs and accept that reality is complicated. Still, "There are no non-believers in Hell" presents a crossroads of works that remains difficult, and somewhat uncomfortable, to grasp.