Surfaceless Paintings - A Fugitive Materiality in the Afterlife of Painting

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Unbinding painting from its presumed surface, Omar Zafar’s Surfaceless Paintings release pigment from the authority of canvas and substrate. Here, paint becomes nomadic—no longer anchored, it forges its own presence in midair. Dried, peeled, suspended, and crisscrossed, these formations speak not only of material liberation, but of aesthetic exile—a refusal to conform to painting’s inherited grammars.

This conceptual departure traces its origin to a moment over two decades ago, when dried paint fragments on the studio floor revealed a latent power—raw, sculptural, and emotionally charged. What began as experiments with repurposed acrylics and household gloss evolved into the use of elastomeric caulk paints, whose malleable skins, once detached, give rise to tangled fields of gesture: opaque and translucent forms caught in states of both collapse and suspension.

In these suspended zones, material becomes fugitive. Gravity becomes collaborator. Chaos becomes composition. These works do not perform painting—they inhabit its afterlife.

Within this mediumless space, distinctions between surface and depth dissolve. What was once hidden—underpainting, backside, residue—now asserts its own voice. The visible and invisible coalesce, suggesting an abstract wholeness that resonates with dualities: masculine and feminine, gesture and void, presence and absence.

Zafar’s surfaceless forms mirror a broader global condition—one defined by disintegration, instability, and displacement. The stretched, suspended fragments evoke not only the fragmentation of painting, but of personal and political belonging. These are works shaped by exile—of pigment, of identity, of form. Yet in their disjointedness, they point toward new compositional logics, new forms of cohesion, and new futures for abstraction.