The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

97 Raafat Ishak Pathways in paint Raafat Ishak’s works are subtle, contemplative and alive with ideas. His paintings often carry echoes of the arbitrary relationships that exist between sign and meaning and, using a visual language both formal and understated, he roams freely among art historical antecedents, across centuries, and within his own locality for inspiration. For APT6, Ishak has created a series of 20 paintings that plays with the evocative potential of form. Within each work he simultaneously combines and deconstructs elements from the expansive, and at times contradictory, archive of imagery he has amassed over time. This cornucopia of references ranges from logos, symbols and flags to biographical details and Arabic text, architecture and art historical motifs. He pushes and pulls at each source, re-imagining their constituent elements in a series of painterly lines, abstracting them to a point almost beyond description. By consciously shaping aspects of his symbology into alternative configurations, Ishak creates ‘hybrid identities that blur distances, time and symbolic currencies’. 1 Ishak lays his catholic array of references across paintings, relocating them to trace a trajectory from Australia to South-East Asia, across the Indian subcontinent to the Middle East and onward to Turkey, the gateway to Europe. Ishak’s work questions ‘the relevance of that path towards, as an example, the birthplace of Cubism and the Utopic vision of the early 20th century’. 2 In a broader sense, he seeks to create an inclusive point of view that ‘concerns itself with common human values and aspirations as well as complexities, unrealised dreams and desires, madness, peculiarities, but most of all, the need to move’. 3 This work is about transit, in a literal as well as an imaginary sense. The paintings themselves are deceptively simple: graphic lines enclose curved or geometric shapes and figurative elements. Each is painstakingly built up in muted, tonally related shades on unprimed MDF, with swathes of raw surface left visible. Ishak’s attitude to scale and materials is unpretentious, yet this pared-back aesthetic enables him to traverse enormous physical and psychological territories. The paintings present an oxymoron of sorts: as ordered explosions they somehow manage to unite disparate visual elements. Ishak flattens these onto the same plane, transposing the real as a chaos of intertwining hard-edge cubist lines. Indeed, evidence of Cubism abounds — Marcel Duchamp’s Nude descending a staircase 1912 is a strong reference and, in his fractured treatment of form, Ishak recalls that painting’s jumble of interlocking planes and lines. In marked contrast to the paintings on either side, a giant industrial castor — starkly rendered, and applied directly to the wall in vinyl — is an unexpected inclusion. It is underscored by the same Utopian, romantic tendency foreshadowed in Ishak’s painted works — a literal nod to ‘revolution’ and radical acts of change that gesture towards a desire to see the world as a different place. The wheel acts as a counterpoint, sitting somewhere at the intersection between art and geometry and, as a symbol of mobility, it facilitates the movement of ideas across and between Ishak’s paintings. The visual grammar at play here is one in which there is no ‘proper’ exit or entry point. While it is possible to identify references harking back to actual places and events — a stadium in Hanoi, a British flag, or a newspaper image of an overturned ute at a border crossing — in its decidedly anti-literal rendering, this work is not meant to be read or interpreted semiotically. Instead, Ishak seeks to create ‘a space of hallucination, or not knowing where you are’. 4 From within this non-specific space, Ishak is able to disrupt the chronology and order of given histories in works that extend beyond the purely visual: ‘Like a pilgrim he walks a path that has been trod many times before, his footsteps becoming yet other symbols, other sites, among those he encounters along the way’. 5 Indeed, the pilgrim tracing personal lines across impersonal space provides an apt analogy for Raafat Ishak’s nomadic wanderings — across the surface of places and cultures, systems of thought and modes of expression. These painterly pathways explore the circularity and dissemination of cultural artefacts, and play with ‘ideas that implode upon themselves, that seem to go backwards and forwards, circling the viewer and by implication the artist’. 6 Bree Richards Endnotes 1 Sarah Tutton, ‘Raafat Ishak’s passage to safe harbour’, Eyeline , no.67, 2009, p.24. 2 Raafat Ishak, email to the author, 11 June 2009. 3 Ishak, email to the author, 5 August 2009. 4 Ishak, conversation with the author, 22 June 2009. 5 DJ Huppatz, ‘Personal archive’, Art/Text , no.67, November 1999 – January 2000, p.49. 6 Tutton, p.27.