Exhibition: Clear Black Smoke

  • Hannah  Barry

Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq'™s work is an invitation to look at the world as a space of pluralism and unity. Drawing inspiration from the visual culture of mysticism, he reinvents it, using it as a toolbox for sculptural experiences that can be located somewhere between fiction and meditation.

Geometrical forms are freed from their initial patterns and find themselves being constantly redefined: the artist alters our notion of such well-known geometries as the pyramid or the star. Every time, new components are added to the usual properties and relations of points, lines, surfaces, solids, changing the aspect of these elementals of visual culture, telling us to look again and to look better - shapes we considered stable are deconstructed and reconstructed, as if they were the stuff of a metaphysical game. Each of them is different, and each expands the borders of the very idiosyncratic visual language the artist has been consistently expanding.
And yet, all these reinvented shapes are nothing but an entry into the unity of transcendence: they pave the way for viewers to engage with the intensity of line and plane, with the depth of the black monochrome or silver, and with the presence in space of shapes conceived as sculptures.
Viewers are invited to engage with abstraction: to accept the fact that every single object the artist makes is a highly crafted, and yet extremely fragile rendition of an abstraction that exists in a space beyond the life of every party involved in the experience of the artwork, where there is no sculpture but ideas. The possibility to contemplate these abstractions and ideas in an extreme and pure form is Mohammed Qasim Ashfaq's great gift to the viewer.