IMRAN MIR - THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE

 ~Durriya Kazi

I never made a painting as a work of art, it’s all research.

~ Pablo Picasso

“I have never been and never will be a product of anything more than myself. My art is my own, why bother stating something about my art that isn’t true?”

~ Alexander Calder

What you see is what you see. ~ Imran Mir

Throughout his career as an artist Imran Mir has remained true to the notion of Art as investigation. He set out on this journey in 1973 while still an art student with his “First Paper” as he chose to call each body of work to the latest “Eleventh Paper” of 2013. Art investigation, unlike the scientific method, sets out without any attempt to visualize the final outcome of the work which may be unexpected and surprising even for the artist. He travels on a craft of intuition, or by initiating a system that will unfold according to its own internal logic.

The process necessitates stringently avoiding pictorial referential work, developing a grammar of lines and shapes that do not derive from nature, planes, lines, curves, volumes and their interaction arriving at, as Gabo states, “ space as an entity in itself, not tied to a familiar object” to a “ more cosmic involvement between space and reality” ( Elsen)

A number of terms emerged from modernist and minimalist art to describe art that aimed to reach beyond what they saw as distractions of pictoriality to reach the innermost essence of things:  Systems Art, Seriel Art, Process art  producing work as varied as Pollack’s drip paintings, Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt’s ‘structures’and diagrammatic drawings, Daniel Buren’s ‘degree-zero’ painting intended to be anonymous non metaphorical self referential works focusing on ‘the visuality of painting’.  

Mir’s work shares some of these methodologies and premises, however he ventures even further into the unknown by relinquishing premise altogether   “My work is a statement but I am not sure what the statement is”.

In this sense it may be more accurate to describe his process as generative - initiating a system into motion and allowing it to follow its own trajectory

The brothers Naum Gabo and Nikolai Pevsner in their Realistic Manifesto1920 announced “ we acknowledge the line only as the direction of static forces that are hidden in the objects, and of their rhythms.” 

And

“The plumb line in our hand, eyes as precise as a ruler, in a spirit as taut as a compass.. we construct our works as the universe constructs its own, as the engineer constructs his bridges, as the mathematician his formula of the orbits.”

Meaning emanates through the process of creative expression, a process that is apparently self organizing, transiting between order and disorder, hinting at fractals. 

As someone who has followed Imran Mir’s works for many years now, despite his reluctance to concede to any interpretation of his work, the complete submission to intuition, gives his work a spiritual almost sufi dimension that is mesmerizing.

By choosing  a monumental scale for his works he further envelopes the viewer within the experience of powerful silence and the still centre of metaphysical movement. It is like contemplating the firmament knowing all is in motion but being acutely aware of the stillness. This is especially evident in Mir’s later works -  the Tenth and Eleventh papers and the in progress Twelfth Paper.

Scale is important to Mir’s work. Inherited from the impact of modernist works especially Rothko, whose work affected him deeply. But it is also a personal quality of being able to think expansively as a visionary in all he undertakes  whether his design practice or the construction of his home and studio.  His journey from the Central Institute of Arts and Crafts, Karachi  to the vast continent of Canada and USA would itself have been a self expanding experience. Toronto, where he studied and New York which he visited regularly, seeing iconic artworks in museums and galleries, is in itself a journey through the layers of time and space.   

1976, the year of Mir’s graduation from OCAD was also the year the tallest structure in the world at the time, Toronto’s CN tower was completed.  It would have been a spectacular event. Mir says he and his fellow students and teachers regularly visited it during construction which coincidentally began when he first arrived in Toronto in 1973.  The sheer scale of it must have been inspiring and it is tempting to imagine it may have contributed to the sense of monumentality in Mir’s work.

While Mir sees himself as a painter, he has always made sculptures alongside his painting practice.  It is not all that surprising. His paintings have a sculptural and architectural quality and his sculptures seem to emerge or spring out from his canvases almost as a necessity.  As early as the Third Paper, Mir’s investigation of the rectangular grid transformed into a three dimensional  installation of stacked boxes.  The sculptures in turn inform the paintings as the surface pulls back spatially culminating in the architectural landscapes of the Seventh Paper.In the Tenth Paper, Mir extracts into real space, more literally, a coil of  wire, almost as if the work insisted itself into real space.  The paintings themselves have a tactile presence. Visiting his gallery with the afternoon light slanting shadows of sculpture onto painting, seeing painting filtered through the grid of sculpture, the relationship of one to the other becomes more poetic. 

The diagrammatic circles that emerged in the Sixth Paper transform into intensely worked full bodied spheres on canvas and from there into two large orbs made up of empty medicine bottles. The sculptures have a playful, witty quality about them unlike the more austere spirituality of the paintings. The sculptures allow Mir to play more whimsically with concepts he has discovered in the course of his investigative paintings. A painting with a bicycle pump  elaborates into a hybrid nautical assemblage of  steeI  orbs, supposedly activated into motion by an antique ship bellows.  Blue painted steel  cubes come tumbling out of  a red ring, a set of faux industrial  devices  with handles implying the activation of spheres or generating bubbles of painted steel.  

Whimsicality not withstanding, the sculptures share with the paintings an inherent theme of implied motion.  Where the paintings hint at a cosmic ‘gardish’ or movement, the sculptures through the devices of handles and pumps  suggest an invitation to awaken in the viewer  a curiosity and urge to  set the works in motion, to be participatory. 

Virtual movement or apparent movement has been explored in all art movements from the Discoblus,to the dynamic propulsion of Russian constructivism’s Tatlin or Archipenko.  Mir’s work is less about heroic activation but more about a contemplative observation closer to Pollock’s drip paintings, Calder’s Stabiles  or Jasper Johns target paintings and sculpture,  but infinitely quieter, shadowing the secret circling of the universe or the laws of physics. These are sensory pieces with loud primary colours which are used  not reductively but to restrict any referential interpretations, and the promise of the sound of mechanical movement.

In the recent body of work, sculpture is no longer  an extension of the investigative paintings,  but their own raison d’etre.  Imran Mir’s studios are spilling with new works, some wrapped up, some displayed. In between lie his organized workstations like oases.  The collective body of work appears to be a prolific and rapid conversation or dialogue between the paintings and the sculptures until the one becomes the other: The sculptures get painted, the paintings carry fugitive shadows made by the sculptures. The studio is like a Tesla laboratory, the stillness waiting to transform into kinetic energy. 

Karachi March 2014