Colorless Paintings

Zafar’s Colorless Paintings confront the inherited hierarchies of abstraction by eliminating its most foundational element: pigmentation. Rather than extending painting’s established paradigms, these works rupture them. Situated within a broader research-driven inquiry, the series probes conceptual thresholds beyond the visible grammar of the medium.

Executed with clear acrylic on transparent plexiglass and other lucid supports, these paintings enact a form of abstraction devoid of chromatic referent. What remains is pure gesture—translucent, suspended, and open to light—foregrounding materiality, ephemerality, and spatial tension.

Transparency functions here as both visual strategy and philosophical proposition: mirroring the porous, hyperconnected systems of contemporary life while gesturing toward a decolorized visuality emancipated from racial, symbolic, and art-historical codes. In resisting chroma, the works disengage from ocular-centric painterly legacies and instead demand oblique engagement, spatial mobility, and durational perception.

Spontaneous gestures—smooth and coarse, transparent and translucent—interact with void and reflection to generate compositions in continuous flux. Ambient light becomes co-author, activating the surface and rendering each work mutable and contingent.

Their spectral presence unfolds gradually, fostering a contemplative encounter. Invisibility becomes both method and metaphor: echoing Zafar’s own marginality within dominant art structures while invoking the condition of those rendered politically and economically unseen.

In this way, the paintings emerge not as images, but as apparitions—a painterly language reimagined beyond pigment, surface, and the visible itself.