Tariq Gill opens painting exhibition at Kuch Khaas

Casein paints are among the oldest art mediums in the world, and were used extensively in the Renaissance period before oil paints gained popularity. However, not many Pakistani artists use this medium. Lahore-based Tariq Gill, one of the few artists who use this medium, put 27 of his contemporary art pieces on display at the Khaas Art Gallery in an exhibition titled ‘A Continuous Dialogue’, which opened on Thursday.
Using ‘casein paint on canvas’, ‘graphite on wasli’, and ‘graphite and ink on millboard’, Gill’s paintings give impressions of caricatures or cartoons, that not only attracted children but also proved to be a serious effort for preserving casein art.
Throughout his growth as an artist, Gill has remained constant, making no bones about his skepticism towards the modernist underpinnings and antecedents of contemporary art. For Gill, art is a place that has no rules. He has no qualms about being called sexist but denies himself any moral high ground precisely in order to challenge you to take it if you dare.
Gill paints leering faces and tangled lines, trailing, rotted flesh as they float to the surface as a depiction of his survey he calls the ‘mental states’. Invoking a death drive, traveling towards the nirvana of stasis, the current exhibition shows that Freud’s most enduring legacy is Gill’s as well.
The artist’s diverse projects are routed into a salon of disjointed visions, alternately washed with paint and sodden with the weight of mastery and decay. Mimicry and fragmentation define the sites of Gill’s aesthetic theft.
Since the artist’s last show at Khaas Gallery in 2010, his homage to European masters has channeled not the distanced criticality of appropriation, but also the bond of projective identification.
In his abject portraits of chaste couples, Gill remains haunted by instability, allowing the characters depicted to level an overly intimate gaze of confrontation and reproach. At odds with the confidence to which his painterly ability and formal imitation aspire, these sad-sack figures with their pin heads, childlike props, and clichéd costumes betray vulnerability and embarrassment, which combine pathos with ludicrousness.
Shaped from the inside out by unseen forces, these faces give a literal or even forensic dimension to Gill’s stylistic pluralism. Teeth push through cheeks, heads shrink into collars. Gill’s combination of mayhem, despair, and European art history is notoriously crowd-pleasing, and the reflections are uncanny. The exhibition will continue at the Khaas Art Gallery till March 5.