About Me

AQEEL SOLANGI
Artist (Painter), living and working in Pakistan. Teaching at NCA (Rawalpindi campus) as an Assistant Professor, Deptt of Fine arts, running my own studio. I joined Mehboob Painters at Khairpur (Mir’s) Sindh, (a sign and cinema board painter for apprenticeship around 1996-97). I joined Department of Fine arts at National College of Arts Lahore in 2000 for pursuing BFA and successfully passed with honours in 2003. Then I enrolled at MA (Hons.) Visual Art at the same institution in 2004 and completed in 2005. I also worked as an art director and as a designer with Afzal studio and Image Bank in Lahore, where I painted huge size backdrops for commercial and art photography and also designed Photo Albums. I was awarded the Young Talent award 2006 by Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) and my work has been collected nationally and internationally including India and in the UK. I was the recipient of NCA/VITA-CW Pak. Trust art bursary in 2006 to spend a term at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts London.




Saturday, August 23, 2008
PERSISTENCE 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.






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.


Although Solangi avoids representation, he does allow the suggestion of land or seascapes in the paintings, by virtue of the gradation of colours from dark at the bottom to lighter at the top. The artist works in a broad range of colours and tones but tends to focus on one range of hues in each painting, from hot reds to creamy pale yellows and olive greens. Peeking through here and there are bits of unexpected, contrasting colours that avert tedium without interrupting the rhythm of the strokes. In one of his strongest works in this series, the beautifully laid-out landscape in the upper right begins the image. In the final version, it is just a small lyrical square almost obliterated by the heavy white hovering cloud that dominates the composition. Solangi’s visual time lines do appear to be, as the name implies, random selections from passing time, the records of fleeting moments. But he has built each moment atop layer on layer of history, sometimes revealed, sometimes obscured. These underpinnings begin with gestural strokes, which he then paints over in thick, viscous lines of oil paint. Some of them have been scraped away and repainted, leaving traces of earlier work and variations in depth. In the final layer, bars of thinned paint are occasionally allowed to drip. Solangi is especially sensitive to the emotional resonances of weather, water, sky, and earth. The way he handles landscape, almost as a reverie, is reminiscent of artists from Watteau to Corot.


It is as if he knows places so well that the details no longer matter as much as the feelings they evoke. Minimal yet lively, his paintings achieve a sense of timelessness through their very lack of specificity. All he needs are a few fierce streaks of blue to conjure up the physicality of the wind and a series of red dots on a green background to portray the essence of a succulent apple. Allegorical fiction dramatised with an imposing mis-en-scene is not an uncommon strategy these days. Such work mobilises two of the most effective antimodernist devices: literariness and theatricality. In Solangi’s work, it remains unclear just what is being evoked by these elaborate devices, and whether there is a real urgency, beyond the artist’s indulgence, that justifies such spectacle – if indeed a spectacle needs any justification. Figures have just about disappeared from his work, and Solangi has dedicated his artistic efforts to the rendering of the natural world in a self-conscious pictorial shorthand quite unlike anything that his contemporaries are attempting. His graphic language is disarmingly suggestive of painting-by-numbers, on the one hand, and – particularly in his version of clouds against an overladen sky – of the facility of a gifted amateur, on the other. It is all the more remarkable, then that his paintings are so rewarding to look at. Areas of foliage contain curious blobs of unnatural colours – pistachio, mint, and emerald among them – alongside more plausible dark, mossy greens. But the overall effect is utterly compelling.



One sees a sea of marks – the totality of a natural context that has apparently lost all traces of individuality. Thrown together in a chaos of anonymous environment, structured only by a few lines that cut like canyons through its mass, the surface appears as a ceaselessly growing organism that, heedless of humanity, is governed by its own logic. Everything indicative of development, narration, or a hierarchical relationship among the different parts of the picture has been rigorously eliminated. The bird’s-eye perspective used by the artist in each of the individual paintings suggests panoramic overview that is revealed as its precise opposite in light of the painting’s reality. The landscape appears as a pure surface structure, a tectonic texture that has no beginning and no end and thus also lacks a horizon against which it might be differentiated. “There used to be civilisation on this planet,” writes Naoya Hatakeyama in one of the texts that regularly accompany his photographic investigations. “One day, however, the people who created this civilisation completely vanished.” This statement reveals much about the attitude that shapes the specific atmosphere of this series by the artist from Sukkur, Sindh. The first aspect worth noting here is that of remoteness, an unbridgeable distance to things that are in a certain sense painted as if he who made them had never been involved in the ‘events’ he records. A related aspect is the principle of deletion – the encircling of an empty centre. Because Solangi’s paintings focus on the natural order but never show people, all of his paintings have the look of representations of an alien world that is empty (and devoid of meaning), a world at which we gaze as if looking at the remains of an ancient culture at an archaeological excavation site. In a third, and perhaps most important sense, however, Solangi’s paintings are meditations on the suspension of time. Naturally, the nature appears literally in a different, sometimes magical light in the rhythm of day and night, but no pattern of continuous development is evident in these changes. The images form an overview that has no temporal progression and thus no before or after, suggesting instead only a remarkable insistence upon the permanence of the momentary that always appears equal yet somehow different.



Under the gaze of Solangi’s paintbrush, the landscape becomes a surreal wasteland. The images he creates in this series are both magical and cold. Their gaze is focused on the seam between nature and memory. On the other hand, nothing could be further from Solangi’s intent than a gratuitous critique of civilisation that decries the crude exploitation of nature in the documentation of the disasters. The idea of preserving a kind of precivilised natural paradise in the midst of our high-tech reality is exposed for what it really is: for instance, a desperate, helpless attempt to domesticate nature as nature parks. Viewed from this angle, the consistent absence of people in all of his works assumes a dynamic quality that flows over to the author of the paintings. The artist is himself affected by the strange ambivalence of absence and presence, of structure and void, that is evident in all of his painted oeuvre. Above all, it is further evidence of Solangi’s ability to generate images in which the self-reflective nature of the painting process converges with the visualisation of a world full of equally suggestive and untouchable surfaces, a world frozen in an eternal moment. Aqeel Solangi has exhibited internationally and now lives in Rawalpindi where he also teaches at the National College of Arts, but he is not yet one of the big names of the current Pakistani art boom. With shows like this, that situation should change. The classically trained yet restlessly experimental artist made the banal topic of memory seem bold and more than a little threatening in these beautiful works in oils, water colours and mixed-media. His work is subtle, and his explorations have been mercurial. These lush paintings breathe new life into the ancient traditions of egg tempera and gesso panels and offer a coherent, fully mature body of work.

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

Posted by AQEEL SOLANGI at 10:10 AM 0 comments
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Time And Memory: My Critics


“The peeling paint surfaces looked up close and the zoomed-in view of flaking plaster seemed bands of usually solid color that may bend and narrow, swell and slant. Their outlines too are irregular, so that the effect is a kind of scalloping, a rhythmic flicker in the eye. This pulse is picked up at the works’ edges, with that might be the moldings of interior de’core. Color and texture are as vital as pattern in these works. In the selection and combination of colors, he reflects his distinctive chromatic eye. In a complex play of alkaline and acid, the dried texture is something like the grainy cake icing. These surfaces seem more absorbent than reflective, as id some dark substrata were sopping up their light - and yet they glow, with a vividness caged in their density.” Aasim Akhtar [Art critic, photographer and curator based in Islamabad, Pakistan]


“Aqeel Solangi has painted clouds in one of his works. Skillfully rendered clouds were placed on top of the composition. Drapery with a big knot in the middle has been painted in red and blue. The object in the bottom was composed with thick clots of paint, which has created a strong texture. In most of his works, he has worked with bright colors and has ended up with glazed finished surfaces. At some places, he has carved hardboard to have a multilevel surface.” Mian Naeem



“Solangi, haling from Sindh has displayed a peculiar traditionalism mixed with western style of painting while playing around with abstraction. He doesn’t call his work abstract, but realistic as for him there is realism in everything therefore nothing is ‘Abstract’. The News International



Posted by AQEEL SOLANGI at 1:14 PM 0 comments
TIME AND MEMORY: THE BEGINNING

"Ages passed
And I did not remember you
Yet, it would be wrong to say
That I had forgotten you"
Firaq




Time and Memory is a major concern in my work. In my schools days we did not have any watch, so school time was marked by measuring shadows. And later on many observations and experiences began to reside in memory in form of layers. I started painting peeling walls that showed decay signifying time and memory. My wall paintings became a metaphor for peeled layers of time.









This same metaphor emerged in historic architecture, and in many other things which I began to observe and experience. I deciphered layer of Frescos as witnesses of the past, encompassing history of man periods in their deteriorating fragments. Keeping this notion in mind, I studied Classical Fresco painting at Lahore Fort, under vigilant eyes of Ustad Saif-ur-Rehman. My present themes evolved from those encounters. Time surrounds our existence and influences it in myriad ways. From the depths of unconscious ticking, it lurks in the psychedelic experience and links us to the happenings of everyday life with strange memories and deep feeling of Déjà vu. Time is in counting numbers, and even in a Zero. It is in shapes and forms, in things hidden and signs and symbols which can not be accessed and deciphered directly.


My work is to deal with the notion of palimsest on with those of slowly natural changes and the passage of time. Process of disappearing and reappearing there is metaphysics of human presence. I explore non physical realities through the depiction of physical layers. In other words, physical character of the wall depicts someone's presence. These paintings represent imagery of self constructed narratives leading me to investigate an association with my past through peeled layers of memory. Clouds, draperies, flowers, are symbols of reminiscences fading away in distant time. "Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed." Henri-Louis Bergson