SHUVO RAFIQUL

Bangladeshi artist Shuvo Rafiqul lives and works in Vienna. After training as a sculptor, he became known as a video artist and in 2012 for co-curating a now-legendary biennial-style exhibition in Dhaka, Bangladesh, together with artist Rini Mitra. A few years ago, Rafiqul turned to painting. Partly inspired by his experiences as a young and promising cricket player, he creates his abstract paintings according to a set of premeditated rules and processes. In cricket, every movement, every finger, every fingertip plays a role, as do light, wind, and shadow. If a single element changes, the entire constellation shifts, again and again. It is this dynamic of inescapability proper to any game (and life) that interests Rafiqul. And what it may or may not produce, be it a sense of instability, weakness or beauty. At its core, it is a process of abstraction that unfolds through lines, colours and shapes, creating spaces that continuously collapse and re-emerge. Within these spaces, gestures and structures are just as essential as emotions and their control. The new paintings on display at Galerie Krinzinger are created through a process that is both deliberate yet evolving, not unlike the editing techniques used in film. There are moments of fast-forward, slow motion, special effects, and even shot-reverse shots. After all, painting, like film, is a time-based medium. Rafiqul’s tools are the materiality of the brush, paint and pencil one literally sees how paint drips, spreads, fails, is painted over and how lines are drawn and redrawn, as if they would never stop being interdependent. White stripes appear in some of the paintings, and I think they’re there to hold the painting together. How? I don’t know, and I don’t need to know. Thus, we find ourselves confronted with paintings that address us with both detachment and intensity. It is an emotional journey that ultimately leads to a composition in which time plays a central role, as the artist himself puts it, one that resembles a time zone, whether here in Austria or in Bangladesh.