AQEEL SOLANGI: FICTIONAL HOMELANDS 2019

AQEEL SOLANGI: The Sites of Myth 2017

Excerpts from the write-ups

The Orange Table 43x60cm - 17x23.5 in. Oil on canvas

The Sites of Myth

Quotidian Space in the Sites of Myth

by Dr. Michele Whiting 

The Abandoned Boat (2016): ‘In this painting three figures narrate their relationship - at a moment in time - to a singular boat. Through a rigorous process of photography, the construction and composition of the painting tells of a pedestrian day in the making. Boredom, as an emotion, hangs heavy through the lack of engagement with the boat in the two seemingly disconnected figures, and the almost banal situation or site. An umbrella lies discarded to the forefront of the work. This object seems dislocated from the subjects, it is heavy like a fallen bird, one has the immediate view that it probably doesn’t function well any longer, but what is it’s purpose? Positioning the umbrella at the forefront of the picture plane, means that the artist has so positioned it for the viewer to be aware of looking into the reality presented, making us, the viewer cognisant of this action, and this is in opposition to Formalist theories that assert flatness and non-illusionistic tendencies. The umbrella here serves another purpose, in that it reminds us of certain Western art histories, such as Hans Holbein the Younger, whose work The Ambassadors, housed at the National Gallery, London and painted in 1533 shows an anamorphic skull hovering in the near picture plane as a symbol of mortality. Correlations can be drawn with the broken umbrella (although not anamorphic) unable to function and discarded into viewer ‘space’, expanding the flatness of the painting, with the nature of being discarded (‘discardedness’) accentuated through the situation of the boat.

The Abandoned boat (2016) 153x184cm - 60x72 inches. Oil paint on canvas

The Sites of Myth - The work of Aqeel Solangi

by Sally Bennett 

Through carefully constructed collages of photographs and found postcards, new places are created from old. But there is no accident or disorder here. Each place is a deliberately contrived entity where layers are revealed or hidden from the viewer. While we know the landscape of each piece is an artificial construct, Solangi’s skilled manipulation of his source material encourages us to connect with the scene. It is familiar and we may even feel we have been there. We become nostalgic for a world that doesn’t exist and the fragmented narrative in each piece lures us like Sirens towards the rocks; as if in a dream. However, this is not our dream. And, while there are autobiographical elements in the content, it is not Solangi’s dream either. The dream belongs to the protagonists in each piece. The people, places or objects of Solangi’s work are in their own world and we are observing them. His subjects are detached, preoccupied - whether they are playing with a Frisbee or reading a book - and our voyeuristic presence is tolerated but not warmly welcomed. We are drawn to a world that is impassive towards us; a message reinforced by the use of the sombre colour palette. The work is at once both familiar and strange to us, and it is the oscillation between these two states I find most fascinating about Solangi’s work. ‘The Sites of Myth’ will remind you of sights you have never seen, of places you have never visited, the memory of which will haunt you for a long time afterwards.

The Reader (2016) 25x30 cm - 10x12 in. Oil paint  on canvas

Tactile Journeys

THE WORLD OF AQEEL SOLANGI 
by Marjorie Husain  

In his paintings he offers a vision of infinite space. One may find his work, abstract in the sense of being ontological, intense and lifting the spirit. Objects and landscapes have meaning that is often changed for the artist’s symbolic purposes. He has painted the clouds from the skies in Rawalpindi and merged them with the hedged green fields discovered in Bashang prairie in Inner Mongolia. Articles and environments are remembered from travel that includes the Asian Art happenings in Dubai, and the Bangladesh Biennale. All these are captured in the artist’s memory and he merges them in a way that encapsulates the world as he says: It’s like a Diary where you write all the happenings together. 

Untitled. 16 x 20.5 in Acrylic and gold leaf on Canvas

In his work the artist achieves a sense of great distance by varying painting techniques from wide sweeping brushstrokes in the far distance to finely detailed, meticulous observed objects in the foreground. He is an artist able to show the surfaces and textures of different aspects of nature with convincing appreciation. One discovers the softness of the clouds, reflection in the water and the pattern of pebbles, with subtle colour variations and an understanding of tonal values that is rare, employing varying shades and compositional effects to guide the viewer’s vision of an artist’s world.

Untitled. 8 x 10 in Acrylic on Canvas

Relocation Mapped

Another Time, Another Space 

by Nafisa Rizvi

There are definitive developments in Solangi’s works. The paintings have been emptied of animate objects like doves or humans as if in preparation of impending Armageddon. What remains is Nature in its unkindest forms. Solangi’s connection to the soil of his home Ranipur is evident and it binds him inextricably to the elements of nature. He cannot escape the rain cloud, the cactus and the Sada Bahar even if he now wishes because they are his lifeline. But it seems significant that the parched earth of which Solangi spoke in his earlier oeuvres has been replaced by volumes of water as if his life has been coated over by a soothing salve that has previously escaped his fortune. Yet the water in the paintings suggests a deluge and an unhappy abundance, even though its azure blue is happily reminiscent of the blue tiles and ceramics of the Persian and Ottoman masterpieces - Muslims at the height of their glory and dignity. Only one of the works glows in the warmth of a sunlit day shining through a doorway that is inviting and at once lonesome. 

Untitled (2013) 76x122 cm - 30x48 in. Oil paint on canvas

Vus'at-e-Bahr-o-Bar

Whispering Images
by Dr. Akbar Naqvi

The images, each different from the other and assembled, to use Solangi’s word, in sangat or accompaniment, enact a kind of chamber music played by them for those whose eyes are open and ears attuned to hear the surgoshi of images between themselves and with the viewers. The images may be disparate like the cloud, drops of water, currents of flowing rivers, cacti which was Sadequain’s signature, sand dunes looking like waves of a dry ocean, periwinkle which is now Solangi’s signature, leaves, trees, houses, circles and empty pipes, but each from its  place joins together to produce the silent music of the paintings. The images connect in the paintings of Solangi and connection is the current orlahar of metamorphosis, transforming, for example, clouds into hills and elephants, sand into water and water into dry oceans of the desert.

The imaginative world of the painter, called by Ibn e Arabi an isthmus, is magical like the narrative of our dastaan like Tilisme Hoshroba or Dastane Amir Hamza, to mention only two. Each image is redolent of memories of a people and land from outside historical time zone. On a neck of the land between two oceans, are churning waters from which, according to the Vedasand Hazrat Ali, the universe was created. In Solangi’s imaginative world everything is connected: drops of water with cloud, cloud with drops of rain, rain with life and the calamity of flood, wait in thirst with death. 

Vus'at-e-Bahr-o-Bar. 24 x 30  in Acrylic on paper on board

The images are Platonic ideas of visual and aural felicity. Images were visual, concrete as well as abstract, Plato believed. And, in Persian and Urdu language they were associated with the luster of dewdrops, a beautifully made sward, pearl & precious jewels. It was said that they had aab, luster of watery light. Let me quote Ghalib on dewdrops, which contain rays of the sun and ornament gardens in early morning:

Kia aina khane ka wo naqsha tere jalwe ne

Kare jo partawe khurshid e aalam, shabnamistan ka.

In simple English, when the fire or light of the sun falls in garden of dew drops, it transforms the mirrors of your reflection, the world of nature. The great Persian poet, Hafiz has said the same thing in his style.

Untitled. 15 x 25 in. Powdered pigments & Acrylic on paper.

The Root, The Ground and The Air

The Polyphonic Painting of Aqeel Solangi 
by Dr. Akbar Naqvi

The lowly cactus against its bleak and barren background is a green sculpture or installation. It is matched in Solangi’s paintings by a profusion of periwinkles or sada bahar flowers, which do not grow in the desert. A periwinkle is not an orchid or a rose, but it has its own humble beauty. The flower is invariably arranged in circles in Aqeel’s paintings. It ought to have been clear that one is looking for intelligence in the arrangement of objects in Solangi’s paintings, because despite their attractiveness they are not dumb like a pretty face empty of mind. For example, the circle is a perfect geometrical form, a favorite of Muslim calligraphy, architecture and arts. It is also the disk of divinity round the heads of the Gandhara Buddha and Jesus Christ in medieval European paintings. It symbolizes time and space, movement and stillness. The periwinkles in circles, and associated with cacti and other objects creates an epiphany of spiritualism distilled from Solangi’s culture of Sindh and Pakistan. When put against a kashkol, the beggar’s bowl, the repeated flower arrangement reminds one of the Friends of Allah with which Sindh, Punjab, Sarhad, Balochistan and Bangladesh were blessed. They taught us the true meaning of humanism as diversity resolved into its own unity. What is happening in Pakistan today is a travesty of its conception, and memories of the Quaid as well as its original leaders. 

Untitled. 25 x 30 in. Acrylic on paper.

Substantial Territories
by Aasim Akhtar

Where Aqeel Solangi revels in the surface beauty of an image, its airtight union of form, colour, and design, he also literally and metaphorically dissects and dissolves images, many times using the half-tone technique as his spur; and all the while raising philosophical questions deeply concerned with not only the way images look and are made but also the possible and probable slippages, uncertainties, and misperceptions that can occur when we apprehend them.

Let me be honest at the outset and admit that the effect of strolling through the installation of paintings and images that Solangi has created is a distinctly uncanny experience. It is a bit like discovering a van Gogh portrait of your grandmother in which subterranean affinities are illuminated and unvoiced harmonies made audible. Clearly for both the artist and the critic, there is dark serendipity in the unlikely encounter between unpeopled landscapes and Solangi’s vision of things. In the current show one might expect an assembly of new paintings to mark yet another way station on the exploratory journey of his career. Solangi’s installation of paintings is, however, less a way station than a piazza, a bounded territory in which the ongoing interests and obsessions of his career cohabit, intersect, and intermingle with a distinctly Western flavour.

Untitled. Mixed media on paper. 

As a consequence, the atmosphere of Solangi’s piazza is imbued with the fragrance of alchemy. It projects the aura of science at the edge of magic. The rituals of sociability and desire he portrays are indigenous and recognisable to its local audience, though no less unnerving for being so. Thus, the tumult of hybridisation, dissolution, and reconstitution that has characterised Solangi’s work is imbued with the blanched sunshine and violent good nature of the desert south. Darkness and light inextricably coexist, as social bonding coexists with aggression against the other. Everything is on its way to becoming something else. We ourselves are always flowing out of ourselves, into zones of transcendence, the cauldron of desire or the collective mystery of society. The whole exhibition is an index of quick fictions that demonstrate the frailty of our aspirations to integrity and understand. The gift these paintings make is the vertiginous, anxious pleasure we derive from being freely lost. In Solangi’s aesthetic, these anxious pleasures  are the best we can expect from a world in which one pays too high a price for the comfort of certainty.

Sufficient Grounds

PESISTENCE OF MEMORY* by Aasim Akhtar

Defined by shadows, the stately, nostalgic works in Aqeel Solangi’s show offer a moving, somewhat cinematic perspective on the power and vagaries of memory. The muted and sun-brightened colours underscore the fluid grace of the works’ pastoral setting. At first glance, the paintings evoke an altogether serene memory: the rootless white flower set against an imaginary background, and the blue sky as if it had always been there. But there is also an overwhelming energy in the pictures.

A master of elision, Solangi lets the part stand for the whole in his graphic paintings that feature overlapping fragments of landscape, ellipses and drapes. The effect is dreamlike yet not quite surreal. Solangi’s work captures a world of ruin and decay where the urban debris mixes with peeling paint to suggest forms of foreboding beauty. His paintings imply landscape, but the elements are abstracted, manipulated, and disconnected: Solangi’s colour choices and compositional balance are often exquisite. But he overthinks his material, and his reworkings sometimes give the work an air of hesitancy.

Untitled. Mixed media on paper

Geographical specificity has no special value here. Each painting consists of an abstracted, denaturalised nature scene with an elliptical disc composed of periwinkle flowers floating in space. It is impossible, however, to separate the emptiness from loss and death. These may be springtime pictures, but the mood is hardly festive. The stylised, expressionistic nature is deliberately staged, as if to parody the 18th-century picturesque. The ellipsis appears and disappears into a void, and so order, both natural and pictorial, is deliberately distorted. Solangi’s artistic will triumphs here, but we pay the price because his play on the edge of abstraction sinks a sharp knife into our heart: absence and desolation prevail. 

* The title has been taken from a paining by Salvador Dali, of the same name.