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Title | Author | Date | ||
Jean-Louis Pradel | 2012-2013 | |||
Jean-Louis Pradel | September 2005 | |||
Marie-Emilie Fourneaux | December 2010 | |||
Retour à la vie (in French only) | Pierre Paliard | October 2001 | ||
Imtiaj Shohag, un artiste originaire du Bangladesh | Cécile Boissimon | July 2008 | ||
Md Takir Hossain | March 2009 | |||
Md Takir Hossain | November 2005 | |||
Md Takir Hossain | November 2004 |
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Untimeliness is a characteristic of painting. Here, in the guise of water, it surges in the broken images Imtiaj Shohag has created. These drifting and severed images follow a sharp geometrical pattern built around the three primary colours. In these angular layers of paint the fragments of a devastated, ruined and flooded world become as many nuggets catching the viewer’s eye. |
Soggy soils, ships lying high and dry, overturned crafts, menacing geyser-like spurts, quivering poultry or tiger about to be drowned, are shard of the looking glass the painter invites us to go through to see reality as it is. Imtiaj Shohag’s paintings are the expression of a demanding aesthetics that chronicles the sound and the fury of today’s turmoil, using “the language of rubble where sun and plaster coexist” as the great poet Aragon wrote in his Stylistic Treatise. Adapted from Jean-Louis Pradel |
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Painting has always been flirting with disaster. The urge to paint has from the start tried to capture and memorise what springs up, surprises and crosses the sky of universal History as well as individual stories like a bolt of lightning. From love at first sight to the worst plagues that strike the suffering mankind, this is always the “untimeliness” that breaks into the sky of painting, crystallizing the swirls around the signs of a timeless lucidity. This lucidity - relating to festive bodies, to a miraculously kindly nature, the soothing of agonies of the flesh and mysteries of the world - endeavours to see clearly into the depth of the storm and the tempest. With the ambition of its mastery, the sovereign authority of its know-how and the apparent ease of its virtuosity, it is always the invincible pleasure of painting that tries desperately to tame the unleashed elements. Form, light and colour are born from the darkness of an indistinct material extracted from the earth’s womb where the dust of pigments mingles with water, oil and all sorts of siccatives to prime again and again - on all sorts of material - a bit of the singular will of individuals to leave, against all odds and all evidence, traces of their passage through the world. Painting can thus been measured by its relation to time more than the one to space. Imtiaj Shohag sets the time of his painting in the midst of the storm, facing the accident, at the very moment when everything crashes, collapses or is engulfed in the turmoil of the wreck. Nothing here that could be regarded as some haughty cynicism springing from the height of an ivory tower, but rather a patient and generous attention to people whom nobody sees, whom no one sees due to sheer indifference. In these times of “real time” when the tyranny of the present burdens us with catastrophes, when the overkill of disasters wipes out all capability for perception, judgement loses breath too quickly in its attempt to follow this slapdash, constantly accelerating film. |
Distraught, everyone gets lost in the dizzying waltz of events exhaling heavy smells of a jungle where might is right, where everyone is handed over to the devastation of unleashed market tigers. While all hierarchy between the derisory and the decisive collapses, while the distant and the near merge on the hypnotic screens, the quest of origins and that of salutary horizons disappear in the same stupor. The blindness of those who see too much is gaining ground. The only thing left is a pornography of postures manufactured by the information industry and its marketing of despise where the sole ruler is a flood of fears on which float the infinite cheap rubbish of the merchants and formatted happiness. Painting, facing so much frustration, impotence, cowardliness and passivity orchestrated by the almighty powers of media, stands over an ocean of wrecks, grabs the pieces of reality scattered all around and brings back dignity and emotion, searches for the enigma, gives back form to this other time, which is that of mankind where memory gives reasons to hope, where the past bodes well for the future. In his paintings of accidents or tsunamis, in his assembling of driftwood as well as in his inventions of landscapes following in the rocky footsteps of Cézanne at the feet of Sainte Victoire, Imtiaj Shohag speaks a language of great need whose every term, snatched from the rumble, saved from fury, seized in the din of our panic-stricken everyday life, resonates far away and for a long time to dwell in the silence of a broader present where heart and reason take the time to see. Adapted from Jean-Louis Pradel |
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