The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

I feel our individual lives are like those of flowers. We are buds, we bloom — and how gloriously the individual stages bloom — and then we rot in stinking water. 1 Raqib Shaw’s exquisite paintings are some of the most exciting works to emerge from the contemporary art scene in recent years. With highly developed technical skills and a truly distinctive vision, Shaw creates gloriously elaborate, yet darkly surreal, environments, where richly embellished hybrid creatures exist in equilibrium between pleasure and pain. Considerable attention has been paid to Raqib Shaw’s reclusive lifestyle, however, more than merely propagating the mythology of the romantic artist, the extent to which this artist blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality is intriguing. Shaw’s paintings are a literal extension of the imaginary world he has created for himself to inhabit. Shaw admits he has always had trouble fitting in, never feeling truly connected to any place or country. While the experience of his native Kashmir is apparent in his technique and style, Shaw concedes that both the memory and the influence of his homeland have diminished after years living in London. According to the artist: As time passes, the boundary between reality and fantasy seems less clear, perhaps as I have come to understand that the perfect beauty of my native country exists only in my imagination . . . 2 This play between the tangible and imagined is the crux of Shaw’s expression. It provides an untethered freedom to transgress the real and to selectively draw inspiration from artists, writers, poets and musicians from a number of countries and cultures — from Sufi music, Persian miniature paintings and the Kama Sutra to French poetry, Japanese prints and textiles, and the work of European artists as diverse as Dutch painter Hieronymous Bosch, German painter Hans Holbein the younger and Italian engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Like a bowerbird, Shaw is drawn to objects of beauty, decorating his studio and home with flowers, antiques and precious objects — creating fantastical vistas in his everyday life. Similarly, his paintings bring together immaculately rendered studies of flora and fauna, intricately woven into something that is at once overwhelmingly sumptuous and explicitly horrendous. As Shaw’s analogy in the opening quote suggests, there is an undercurrent of putrid festering to the dazzlingly florid surface of these scenes. In Blossom Gatherer II 2010–11, with its elaborate cloisonné-like skill and luminous metallic hues, Shaw depicts acts of bloody carnage witnessed by a torturously bound half-human–half- animal-figure, screaming in uninhibited ecstasy or unrestrained terror. Many characters inhabiting Shaw’s rhinestone-adorned worlds exist at the edge of a common morality — where sex and violence reign without fear of condemnation and all are free to indulge in uncensored gratification. Animals stray from hierarchies of predator and prey, as in The Last Horse King (from ‘Paradise Lost’ series) 2011–12, where ordinarily harmless birds join pack hunters in a graphically depicted feeding frenzy. Shaw is drawn to the emotional and physical toll of painting which he claims ‘demands sweat, blood and tears and I like that masochism that comes with it’. 3 Painting allows him to enter his own world, to explore and give voice to his most intimate concerns. He is cognisant of the unrelenting unease he is able to wield with his compositions, which he describes as existing ‘anxiously on the threshold of nervous collapse’. 4 As a viewer, we are compelled to participate in the psychotic adventure. From a distance, Paradise Lost 2001–11 evokes a sense of enlightenment reminiscent of Australian artist William Robinson’s epic multi-viewpoint landscapes — alluding to a transition from foreboding isolation to gregarious revelry. Panning from darkness to light, we travel from night and a figure howling at the moon to the gay abandon of monkeys feasting in a tree overladen with blossoms in the warm, early light. Closer inspection reveals, as we have come to expect from Shaw, an escalating scene of frenetic violence — things won’t be better in the morning. This shrill anxiety is the fuel that fires Shaw and the latent energy of his work. Writing about the work of some artists involves an active search for a hook or connection to share; with others, there are so many intriguing facets it is difficult to know where to begin or where to end. Any attempt to describe Raqib Shaw’s work, or analyse his unique impression of the internal and external world, seems destined to only ever scratch the magnificently extravagant and complex surface of his creations. Sarah Stratton 1 Raqib Shaw, in conversation with Gerald Matt and Angela Stief, Raqib Shaw: Absence of God [exhibition catalogue], White Cube, London; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2009, p.109. 2 Shaw, p.105. 3 TATE, London, Art Now: Raqib Shaw [interview], recorded 9 October 2006, <http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/art-now- raqib-shaw>, viewed 12 September 2012. 4 Shaw, p.106. RAQIB SHAW In full bloom RAQIB SHAW India/United Kingdom b.1974 The Last Horse King (from ‘Paradise Lost’ series) (detail) 2011–12 Oil, acrylic, enamel, glitter and rhinestones on birch wood / 274.3cm (diam.) / © Raqib Shaw / Image courtesy: The artist and White Cube, London / Photograph: Ben Westoby 201