The paintings of Imran Mir will doubtless surprise and perplex a Sri Lankan public, for he belongs to a rare breed that is seldom encountered on our shores: that of abstract artist.
Sri Lankan painting from its early origins on the walls of monastic caves has been representational, pictorial, narrative. The great tradition of Buddhist temple art has been pre-occupied with telling visual stories - stories in which the exploits of people and prophets unfold across a landscape of boulders, trees and buildings - and communicating ideas - ideas about virtue and the perils of evil. And modern Sri Lankan painters have slipped naturally into this mould.
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| Imran Mir |
George Keyt, although heavily influenced by European modernism, remained a figurative painter who was intent on telling a story, on expressing an idea. Ivan Peries, for many years marooned on the shores of the English Channel, painted dreamlike evocations of a Sri Lankan landscape populated by wraithlike figures, ostensibly conveying emotions associated with solitude and exile.
And the same is true of the new generation of Sri Lanka’s artists. Jagath Weerasinghe, a leading painter and influential teacher, engages with the process of abstraction, but his paintings are still representational. His moving series of Natarajas or his endless explorations of the Dambulla Rock may involve a process of stripping away, but they remain rooted in a tradition of figure and landscape; the more they are ‘abstracted’ the less abstract do they appear.
In Britain the public is similarly perplexed by pure abstraction. Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore, both remembered as abstract painters, began as landscapists and evolved towards an abstracted representation which had its roots in images of landscape. Henry Moore, often described as an abstract sculptor, created forms which were at once both figures and landscapes and which remained always representational. People leaving the recent Anish Kapoor exhibition in London felt cheated.
“What does it mean?” they asked the waiting TV cameras. When these people lie back on a grassy bank and look at clouds crossing the sky they involuntarily seek out the narratives they have been programmed to look for since childhood: over there is a cathedral, here a fierce giant chasing a gang of children.
They have been rendered incapable of looking at something for what it intrinsically is: a billowing cloud of water vapour. Kapoor’s huge forms explore geometry, materiality and space, but are utterly devoid of any narrative content or of any explicit or implicit layers of meaning. They are what they are. Kapoor is not telling stories or representing feelings, but he is inviting you to make your own stories. So it is with the work of Imran Mir.
Born in Karachi in 1950, Mir studied at the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts before moving to Canada where he graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1976. He then lived briefly in New York before returning to Pakistan where he set up his own advertising agency. However he continued to paint and to exhibit his work and was one of the founders of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.
Mir belongs to a culture which boasts a long tradition of pattern-making and abstract geometry, a culture in which mathematics and astronomy have been of paramount importance. But it is also significant that he studied and lived for many years in North America. It was in New York in the late 1970s, then a hothouse of ‘abstract expressionism’, where he encountered the work of Pollock, Calder, de Kooning, Kline and Rothko, and where he was invited to exhibit.
Mir clearly sees his work as an on-going series of experiments and refers to his exhibitions and publications as ‘papers’, as if they were being submitted for scrutiny by a group of academic peers. Each work is, in effect, a proposition which is presented for testing. These experiments have to do with the exploration of the limits of surface, line and colour and the representation of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane. They are abstract aesthetic exercises which touch on questions of beauty, harmony, discord, complexity and pattern. Although they are the result of a process of careful distillation which seems to lead towards minimalism, the apparent simplicity of what is offered invites a complexity of response.
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Two things are striking, not to say surprising, about his current series of paintings. First is their size. Here size does matter and one is reminded that bigness is an absolute quality. The sheer scale of the works invites a particular response, adding an enhanced sense of three-dimensionality to even the flattest of canvases and inviting the viewer to enter inside the work. Second is the fact that, in spite of an initial impression that these images have been generated on a computer or a huge pantograph, they are in fact meticulously hand-crafted objects like huge miniatures.
The current collection includes a series of diptychs in which one canvass is paired with another. But these are not twins, often not even siblings. They hang side by side like strangers caught together in a waiting room and engage in a muted but tangential dialogue.
My assumption, or guess, is that Mir does not intend his work to carry any meanings or messages, values or emotions. He is not interested in making political or social statements or influencing the thoughts or actions of his viewers. He invites you to explore his paintings, to experience them, respond to them for what they are. He invites you to invent meanings, dream up messages, attach values, feel emotions of your own, and then to stand back and enjoy. One hopes that that Colombo will accept the invitation and rise to the challenge. |
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