Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: May 18, 2018 | 
| 中文
Suleman Khilji
The long and diverse history of art brims with a multitude of artists foraying into investigations of the natural landscape. While many an artist was enthralled by the beauty of the human body, significant painters such as Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne gave new meaning and life to natural surroundings that morph and shift, providing a sublime backdrop to the human experience. In How to Make a Contemporary Landscape, a two-person show at the O Art Space, Lahore, Saba Khan and Suleman Khilji displayed works rooted in the idea of the landscape as a subject, and what this subject stands for in these modern times.
Widely known and revered in the art circle, Saba Khan is a name that brings to mind the glittering, gaudy aesthetic of the middle class in Pakistan. Injected with acerbic wit, Khan’s work gazes at the working class and the elite through a kaleidoscopic lens of humour and truth, using almost lurid visuals to haunt the audience with something inexplicably intimate and yet oddly unfamiliar. In this particular body of work, backlit white box-frames hold drawings of fountains, painted in watercolor. There is a childlike quality behind the mark-making, with the water spouting from the fountains in almost decorative patterns, and a skewed perspective of the fountain structures. These fountains are afloat against the white of the paper, looking untethered and forlorn against the glowing background. The illumination is a distraction, reminiscent of the one created by authorities when presenting promises to their citizens. Beneath each frame, stuck to the wall, are photographs of a working-class family standing against various backgrounds. The patriarch is missing an arm, which is often caused by labour work accidents. In an attempt to “modernise” the city of Lahore, and taking inspiration from the city of Paris, the municipality constructed many fountains at roundabouts in the city. These fountains do not function, whether located near greenbelts smattered with fake grass, or near abandoned digging sites reeking of false promises of new transportation. Khan has photographed this family against all such sites, transforming them into a symbol of reality, a motif for the underprivileged class of Pakistan, and an element of contrast against the government’s promises of a Paris in Lahore, which the working class will always remain on the outside of. In creating the landscape, Khan wonders, have we sacrificed the vulnerable individual citizen? The drawings, sometimes aggressive, make that clear. In answering how to make a contemporary landscape, Khan’s observation is simple and true: as the landscape swells and expands to accommodate foreign plants, technologies and wars, the local family shrinks and disappears to make room.
As an artist, Suleman Aqeel Khilji chooses to tell stories from his everyday life in Lahore and Quetta. These tales of transience and enchantment are full of eccentric, almost comical characters found on the streets of both cities. The artist’s preoccupation is not with one particular character or setting, but rather with the apotheosis of the moment when the subject interacts with the setting or vice versa. This subject might even be a striped plastic shopper, the translucent kind one might find in a bazaar or a mandi, hovering above the ground with a life of its own. Painted with the kind of sensitivity that makes it appear as both frail and alive, this oil on canvas shopper is set against barely legible, scribbled sentences in the background. Here and there, observational drawings of faces in pencil mark the canvas, bringing to mind a page from an artist’s every day journal, maintained as he sets forth into the city to interrogate the landscape. Characters donning crazy headgear, neon lights glowing, objects floating and dancing, all make appearances. In one painting, a peculiar little green car floats mid-air, its shadow soft and specks of gold adorning the ground beneath. The car might be a beloved toy, or a real car elevated and transformed by the artist’s imagination, hovering as if by magic. Behind the car, over and over, the same words in pink chalk, keep moving keep moving keep moving. This is the humdrum reality of the city life and its landscape; ever moving, ever changing. The artist’s depiction is anything but ordinary, he appears to see the evolving landscape as an idiosyncratic character in itself, moving and changing, merrily afloat in a world of possibility.
Both bodies of work are emblematic of how far landscape art has come: what began as water lilies in a pond and starry night skies, has evolved into works of art that are not only insightful, but also deeply aware of the fact that a land only becomes a landscape by the life its people breathe into it.
You may also like:
