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Artist Texts
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Bridging Boundaries: Transcendence, Innovation, and Dialogue Through Abstraction
Reimagining painting beyond the constraints of historical and contemporary expectations, I delve into the core foundations of painting, dismantling established conventions to expand its visual language. Through abstraction, I employ a heuristic approach akin to scientific exploration, transcending conventional paradigms with interactivity, colorlessness, and surface-less forms. Rooted in my multicultural background, I embrace an eclectic style that transforms painting from passive observation into a dynamic dialogue, making the viewer’s participation integral to the artwork's evolution.
Working with transparent pigment-free mediums, I developed a technique where these mediums form its own structure, thus, introducing 'colorlessness' to painting. The interplay of translucent layers, voids, and negative spaces creates a sensory experience that explores light, texture, and emptiness. Metaphorically, this 'colorlessness' reflects the de-colorization of race and the permeability of our interconnected world, both serving as visual and conceptual tools. Viewing the work from different positions may offer an immersive, ethereal experience—an abstract spirituality inviting alternative perspectives and challenging perceptions of painting. The absence of color and surface parallels the invisibility of marginalized communities, inviting reflections on race, identity, and displacement.
In contrast, the 'Surfaceless Paintings' also autonomously forge their form without a canvas, but by utilizing color in place of transparency. This approach highlights the tactile and emotional qualities of paint, pushing its physical boundaries. Through acrylics and elastomeric caulk, I developed the 'surface-less' concept, where dried paint hangs suspended in space, revealing both underpainting and overpainting as integral parts of the viewing experience. I invite viewers to reassess their perceptions, by engaging multidimensionally with painting and fostering broader perspectives. The 'surfaceless-ness' reflect my sense of foreignness
and quest for validation in the art world, metaphorically resonating with the plight of displaced humanity in today’s global context.
Democracy in art is central to my practice. Much like ancient Greek philosophy embraced the collective will, my 'interactive paintings' transfer creative responsibility to viewers through magnetic surfaces. Participants actively shape the work’s composition, questioning a painting’s inherent identity and mirroring the unpredictability of contemporary life. This 'composition-less' disposition, akin to 'quantum flux,' invites diverse interpretations, transforming painting into cultural dialogue that transcends perceptual divides, dismantling social barriers and taboos through tactility and participation.
I use abstraction as a metaphor and a tool for exploration. The alien quality of my work—defying established parameters—positions me as an "alien artist" bridging East and West through innovation and participation. Via my interactive, colorless, and surface-less works, & with yet unexplored possibilities; I aim to encourage empathy and transformation, offering a thoughtful contribution to the global dialogue where art serves as a bridge for connection transcending cultural, social, and aesthetic norms.
Omar Zafar, October 2024
Articles
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Painting Beyond Painting: Forging Untraversed paradigms
Alibi Gallery, Sarri 12, Athens
Solo Exhibition: 16 May – 20 June 2024
Painting as a trajectory forged by concept
During his long standing career, and even during the periods of long pauses of artistic practice, Omar Zafar investigates through personal, unique means of expression the vibrant world of interaction, experimentation and daring innovations in contemporary painting, unveiling an eclectic collection that transcends boundaries and showcases further possibilities within the genre, beyond the confines of contemporary appropriation. Omar Zafar has been examining, as a cultural anthropologist, the social development of painting as historical occurrence. His rich cross cultural background, his dual Greek and Bangladeshi origin in co-existence with his international traveling experience resulted in a unique eclectic perspective which questions deeply the original values of the genre of painting.
The obsessive repetition of cut sculptural pieces on display and their serial aspect makes everything stacked against a stereotype imagery. During the interaction with the painting, every piece of paint is subordinate to the other. All the space in between and the connection between them creates different angles of seeing, a play on the closeness of similarities and dissimilarities. It is a twisted play in which subjectivity comes forth and the spectator studies closely his co-existence with the painterly surface.
On the other far end surfaceless canvases are an ode to transparency, to existence and non-existence, a question on the power of abstract semiology. It is liberating, free and easy with the old forms, like a new pop statement contemptuous of old rigid rules.
He stands out of most homogeneous painterly rules and his choice of material, paint itself, the canvas as a matrix, the frame as installation give to colour itself a new temporal and sculptural sense. He fragments and defragments the image, reassembles it in a randon configuration betraying a desire to break away from the fixed framework of composition and canvas. Ηe invites the spectator to unite with works in celebration of art’s transformative power—to inspire, to provoke, and to forge connections that resonate across cultures and generations. The audience may actually touch and interact with his works. A new form of spectatorship is born, that of an energetic and performative spectator.
With works such as The Chaotic Essence of Possibilities Within The Perpetuity Of Choice we come close to issues of being invisible, being torn apart and being without a base and still striving for dreams! His “Persistence Of An Unknown Journey” (title of a painting created in 2024) is a reference to our chaotic world order, and quest for power and the consequence of disorder from too much choice and uncertainty, and of the corruption of democracy. We all go through “The Invisible Exercise” via “The Non-coherence Of Invisibility” and this is a way through to pose the enigma of science and its advancements and where it may take us in the future. A test for the future Predicaments and the irony of globalization and the AI word order. Omar Zafar is ‘digging’ spiritually in the values of the painting genre not only to examine it as a scientific experiment but also as a way of sharing a spiritual path, a metaphorical expression of the possibility of spirituality via artistic freedom and innovation.
In the large surfaceless hanging paintings such as Made in Bangladesh and Finished in Europe,he speak out against the political and economic hypocrisy of the West. We are visible or invisible in relation always to our stance and tautology in life and society. And art can be on a canvas or ‘canvas-less’, as it is more than a decorative and marketing manifestation. It is a source of transformation, and the eye focuses on the mind. The personal gestural abstract way of thinking is nature, and there is a heavy hand of nature on nature. The untraversed paradigms are poetically involving the senses beyond the actual means, beyond the stereotypes of elitism. Spiritual and transcendental. By no means exquisitely unique, but a children’ amusing, sensational colorful or even colorless game for all of us.
Margarita Kataga, Art Critique & Curator
Athens
May 2024
Extensions of Μan
18 - 28.10.2000
CHEAPART Gallery
Omar Zafar has come to offer answers through his art by presenting us his "Creatively Interactive Paintings". He believes that in order to predict the future (of painting) one must create it himself. The postmodern artist, as Zafar's art indicates, is not merely an antimodernist but he deconstructs only to reconstruct anew and expand aesthetic fields.
Zafar's art is about keeping painting alive by redefining it, by inventing a new vocabulary. In this "Creatively Interactive Paintings" he is the first to replace the canvas by a magnetic surface and vinyl coated magnets are moved around the surface by the viewer - who is now creator - creating abstract or specific forms. Forms are not fixed on his magnetic fields as roles are not fixed, thus breaking one of the oldest and most traditional conventions in art history, the distinction between creator and spectator. Zafar's art is not confined by limitations of any king. It is scientific in nature because it is experimental, it is ephemeral and undergoing continuous change as the spectator can tirelessly create new forms, thus resulting in his art being constantly in a flux, and therefore it is timeless. If as the artist believes there are two periods in painting, the period of creation and the period of function, then his "Creatively Interactive Paintings" fulfill both.
Zafar has realized what artist in the 60's tried to battle, and has made it an advantage in his art. In the 60's the artist realized that once their art work/creation left the studio and entered the system of art distribution or art market (e.g. galleries) and promotion (e.g. art critics, media) the artist had no control over his creation. It could be presented, interpreted, experienced, marketed in anyway the owner found suitable, often disregarding the initial intentions of the artist. Zafar realizing this creates art so that you can be the artist. From the beginning he does not seek to have the power of the creator but entrusts you with it. Imagine an artwork that is not of a specific time, that is not burdened by the biases of the creator, because the creator changes, so that the work is not created by a man or by a woman, but maybe even at times by both. J. F. Lyotard proved by using the example of Marcel Duchamp, the founding father of postmodernism who lived and produced postmodern art in a modernist period, that time is not linear. Time is circular.
Curated by: Olinka Miliaresi Phoka
Artists: Nikos Giavropoulos, Giannis Theodoridis, Omar Zafar.
Links to Press
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2024
https://www.artistcloseup.com/blog/interview-omar-kazi-zafar
https://www.athinorama.gr/texnes/3029234/o-omar-zafar-kanei-zografiki-pera-apo-ti-zografiki/
Pre - 2024
https://www.cheapart.gr/article/906/archive-extensions-of-man-/