For years, Riaz Rafi has painted the things that cannot always be put into words. Now, one of his paintings is speaking for him in a place where thousands of people pass through every day.
The Pakistani-American artist’s Day and Night has been selected for display at the International Airport of Houston (IAH), where it will remain for two years. For Rafi, the placement is about more than having his work seen in a busy public space. It is also an opportunity to carry a piece of his Pakistani identity into an international setting.
Silver Streets Artists took to Instagram to share the exciting news, writing that the airport will be featuring Rafi's work, which they termed a project that provides "signature energetic abstract brushwork and rich tonal contrast" and "explores the seamless duality of light and shadow, motion and stillness — a fitting theme for travelers journeying across time zones".
They added, "As part of IAH’s one-year public art program, "Day & Night" will welcome millions of international and domestic visitors passing through Houston over the next 12 months".
https://ift.tt/QAyxtoi
“As a Pakistani, I am proud that my painting is displayed at an international airport,” Rafi says. “First, it is to be a Pakistani and also that a work is displayed there and the theme, colours and everything.”
The significance of the setting is not lost on him. An airport is a place of constant movement, where people from different countries and cultures briefly share the same space. Rafi sees that as an opportunity for art to communicate something about the country and culture an artist comes from.
He calls it a country’s “soft image” — an idea he says he had discussed previously on a podcast.
“The soft image which is produced of an image of country, they always show how your country is,” he says. “Your art, culture, music, and dance and all is a reflection of that, so it is a good way to show a soft image of Pakistan.”
That idea is particularly relevant to Day and Night, a work created from the perspective of someone who belongs to two worlds. Rafi is Pakistani by origin and American by residence, and the painting reflects that duality.
Rafi says he is normally reluctant to give his paintings titles. He prefers viewers to arrive at their own interpretations and questions. In this case, however, a title was necessary.
“For the title, I am not keen on just making one,” he says. “I want the viewer to look themselves and see how to understand the painting and raise questions but this was an area where I had to give a title.”
The title itself draws on both Pakistani language and American symbolism.
“In Urdu, we have a saying, ‘Kabhi ke raate bari, kabhi ke din bare’ — some days are long, some nights are long,” he explains. “So here our American flag also has two colours, blue and red, so I kept that in mind when making the creation.”
“Because I am a Pakistani-American artist, I wanted to paint from that point of view.”
The painting will now occupy a very different kind of audience from the galleries and exhibitions where Rafi has shown his work over the decades. He expects travellers from different countries and backgrounds to encounter it, even if only for a few moments.
“This will be in display for two years and whoever travels in those years will see and appreciate the work,” he says.
Rafi’s path to that airport wall has hardly been straightforward.
Born and raised in Sukkur, he developed an interest in drawing as a child. His early years in the city became an important foundation for an artistic career that would eventually take him to Lahore, Karachi and, decades later, Houston.
His formal education in art included the National College of Arts in Lahore and the Karachi School of Art. His journey through the Pakistani art world also brought him into the orbit of influential artists and institutions that would shape his development.
One of the most important figures in his development was Ali Imam, the influential Pakistani artist and gallerist. Rafi worked at the Indus Art Gallery in Karachi and has repeatedly credited Imam and that environment with helping shape his artistic sensibility.
“Ali Imam was one of Pakistan’s people who made us how we are,” Rafi says. “In 1970 he opened Pakistan Indus Gallery which was country’s first modern gallery which created awareness of art and brought it to people’s houses.”
“My real growth happened from Indus Art Gallery.”
He also encountered artists and cultural figures including Firdous Haider and Nighat Chaudhry. His interests were never limited to painting. He learned Kathak from Chaudhry, not as a professional dancer but as another way of understanding movement.
“I am not a professional but I used my art and learning of strokes. I wanted to learn rhythm and continuity through that,” he says.
That sense of rhythm can be found in the way Rafi discusses his paintings. His work has moved between figurative art, abstraction, calligraphy and mixed media, with his influences and interests evolving throughout his career.
But perhaps the most remarkable chapter of his life came when he temporarily lost the ability to speak.
A complicated operation left Rafi without his voice for a period of years. Before that, his artistic life had also crossed into television and acting. The experience of suddenly being unable to speak became another unexpected source of material for his work.
Rafi recalls that during a drama shoot in Hyderabad, he suddenly lost his ability to speak and people thought he was a beggar. He began thinking about what it meant for someone to lower himself completely in order to ask another person for something.
“When I felt that, I left that — a man who is begging for something, he has put himself so low to ask for something,” he says.
“That beggar instinct came as a thought process.”
The experience became a subject for his art.
“From there, the subject came to me,” he says. “That subject came to me because those thoughts always come naturally.”
The loss of his voice gave that instinct for visual communication another dimension. The canvas became a place where he could continue expressing ideas when spoken communication was temporarily unavailable.
There is a certain irony in that history now. A man who once lost his voice is seeing a painting of his speak for him to international travellers.
Rafi says he does not approach the canvas with a rigid blueprint. Instead, ideas accumulate through observation — nature, birds, people, cultural events and the everyday environment around him.
“For planning, when you sit at the canvas there is none,” he says. “But naturally because I get inspiration from nature and birds as well as the culture here and meeting people, there is always something going on.”
“Being here, the thought process is going on and whatever culture event there is, something comes on the canvas on its own. Aesthetically, it is a very strong painting.”
His background in journalism has also remained part of the way he approaches painting.
“My painting usually has a generalist approach. I also have a masters in journalism so there is also that approach in my strokes and colours,” he says.
After coming to the United States in 2013, Rafi says he initially travelled around, visiting museums and galleries before deciding that Houston offered the kind of environment in which he could work with greater calm and freedom.
“I came here in 2013. I actually came from an exhibition and after exploring museums and galleries, I felt that here I could work very calmly and with much freedom,” he says.
Houston also gave him a community in which he could continue exhibiting and developing his practice. His studio is part of the city’s large artist community, where he works alongside hundreds of other creatives.
“The background is that my studio is in my medium district where there are around 200 artists, from which I am but I am one of few South Asians,” he says. “Wherever there are group exhibitions, they ask us for work.”
The city’s airport programme has similarly tried to make its terminals a reflection of Houston’s diversity. In its official calls for artists, the City has described airport art as an opportunity to create memorable first impressions for international travellers and to represent the city’s diverse culture, landscape and ideas.
For Rafi, however, the journey from Pakistan to Houston is not simply about geography. It is about the accumulation of experiences that eventually find their way onto a canvas.
His career has taken him from Sukkur to Karachi, from the galleries of Ali Imam to television, from painting to dance, from a period of silence to a renewed visual language, and now to an international airport where his work will be encountered by people from around the world.
Asked about what comes next, Rafi is reluctant to make grand predictions.
“For future, I can’t say but I believe your work speaks volumes and if it is good and powerful, people will appreciate it,” he says.
He says money, status and displays of material success have never been his motivation.
“I am never on money or showing cars or anything,” he says. “Your work speaks volumes.”
For Rafi, the airport selection is therefore another chapter in a career built less around spectacle than persistence. He sees the opportunity as evidence that the work itself can travel beyond identity, geography and background.
“Because things happened here on merit, they didn’t see I’m South Asian or Pakistani,” he says. “They saw my work over many white artists too.”
“I am not such a big artist but for many years I’ve been doing work with dedication and let’s see where future takes me now. It will only bring more success.”
For an artist whose life has repeatedly crossed boundaries — between Sukkur and Karachi, painting and dance, speech and silence, Pakistan and America — Day and Night may be an especially fitting painting to carry his story forward.
At an international airport, people will arrive and depart beneath its colours. Some may know the artist. Others may know nothing about Pakistan, Sukkur, Ali Imam or the years when Rafi could not speak.
They will simply encounter the painting. And, for Rafi, that is enough.
from Latest Lifestyle News, Fashion & Celebrity News - The Express Tribune https://ift.tt/WM96Idj
0 Comments