What's So Unique About Raqib Shaw’s Cross-Cultural Fantasy World?

Digvijay Nikam

“Art extracts every bit of existence from you — that’s the promise of the divine.”
– Raqib Shaw

Among the thousands who were displaced during the political unrest of 1989 in Kashmir was the family of the artist Raqib Shaw. Born in Calcutta in 1974, Shaw spent his formative years in Kashmir where his family worked as merchants. After relocating to New Delhi in 1992, he started working for his maternal uncle in the family business, an activity that encompassed interior design, and architecture, to selling jewellery, antiques, carpets, and fabrics; an experience which introduced him to the material culture of India that later on was to have a formidable influence on his artistic sensibility.

Interestingly, Shaw never had inclinations to be an artist; it was only in 1993 when his family business brought him to London and he encountered paintings at the National Gallery for the first time, especially Holbein’s The Ambassadors, that the conviction to spend the rest of his life as an artist took shape. In 1998, Shaw moved to London where he studied for both his BA and MA at Central Saint Martins School of Art. Shortly after graduating, he was talent-spotted by the art dealer Victoria Miro, and since then has exhibited at Tate Britain in London, the Met in New York, the Manchester Art Gallery, Galerie Rudolfinum, Prague, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

Self Portrait as Bottom – A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 2016. Acrylic liner, enamel, glitter, and rhinestones on birch wood. 152.5 x 213.5 cm. Courtesy of Raqib Shaw.

Shaw is known for his opulent and intricately detailed paintings of fantastical paradises which reveal an eclectic fusion of Eastern and Western influences – from Persian carpets, Indian miniatures, and Japanese lacquerware to Northern Renaissance paintings, Watteau’s fêtes galantes, and Surrealism. His signature style of using enamel paint with a porcupine quill that gives all of his works a distinctive and immediately recognizable charm was developed after his early experiments and disappointments with a number of materials. All his paintings begin with preparing the background in oil paint over which the composition consisting of line drawings is projected. These line drawings act akin to cofferdams in which paint is later poured in and manipulated and inlaid with vibrantly colored jewels using porcupine quills to create the desired effect which reminds one of the ancient Asian pottery techniques of ‘cloisonné.’ The work is immensely intricate and despite his team of assistants, it takes years to finish any painting.

Paradise Lost. 2000-2011. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Drawing on a wide range of sources including art history, mythology, poetry, theatre, religion, science, and natural history, Shaw’s paradisiacal paintings try to engage the past and present, as well as both public and personal memory into a dialogue. Modelled upon the epic poem of John Milton, Paradise Lost from 2011 is one of his most exquisite painting series including the 300 x 900 cm title painting which is Shaw’s biggest to date. The viewer here follows the journey of a lone figure, a lion king of sorts who alongside a wolf howls at the moon. The image suggests a movement from north to south, where the south signifies experience and a full blossoming; however, if paradise means anything for Shaw, it is a fantasy of a return to the state of innocence.

The Four Seasons “Spring,” 2018 – 2019. Acrylic liner and enamel on Birchwood 114 x 120 cm. Courtesy of Pace Gallery.

This yearning for a state of unblemished innocence runs through his oeuvre and gains political charge in his collection Landscapes of Kashmir exhibited in 2019. Four Seasons, which is a series in the collection, consists of four paintings depicting four seasons, the first of which is Spring. It presents a fairytale-style image of a young boy reading in the branches of a cherry blossom tree surrounded by idyllic countryside and animals. This romanticized past of Kashmir that Shaw associates with the pre-civil war days of his own childhood takes a frightening turn by the time we reach Winter.

The Four Seasons “Winter“, 2018-2019. Acrylic liner and enamel on birch wood. 114 x 120 cm. Courtesy of Raqib Shaw.

We witness the Shaw character, in a flamboRyant golden gown, perched upon the top of a dead tree being attacked by colourful monstrous creatures. The roots of tree are composed of grey corpses which upon closer examination reveal themselves to be alive, trying to escape, and grossly resemble the artist. This horrifying cruelty betrays the mesmerizing background, which is an incisive comment on the current state of Kashmir.

The Retrospective 2002-2015 (2015-22), Acrylic liner, enamel, and rhinestones on aluminium. Courtesy of White Cube.

One of Shaw’s most recent masterpieces includes a work titled The Retrospective 2002-2022 which was the final piece of his 2022 solo exhibition Palazzo della Memoria at Ca’ Pesaro, Venice. The painting, taking inspiration from Giovanni Paolo Pannini’s Modern Rome (1757), celebrates Shaw’s career. “I wanted to paint a picture that would document all major paintings to date, chronologising not only my development as a painter but also as a human being,” says Raqib. “It also satirizes the notion of a great artist and comments on the fleeting impermanent nature of our existence,” he adds. Amidst the colourful frenzy stands the figure of Shaw, again in an ornate attire with an odd bird mask, holding his beloved dog Mr C. The stormy foothills of the Kashmiri Himalayas form the background while his paintings embellishing the European interior occupy the foreground rendering an aesthetic chaos that demands an attentive eye to slowly unearth the painting’s depth.

Art, for Shaw, represents the eternal search and consequent expression of what it means to be alive and human. His astounding paintings present to the viewer’s gaze an impossibly intricate work yet with a sense of inarticulable composure, time and again forcing us to confront the question, “What is important in this kind of very ephemeral thing that we call life?”

References

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/apr/02/paradise-painted-porcupine-quill-wild-visions-raqib-shaw