AYESHA JATOI

The text plays an increasingly important and dominant role in all the work of the artist, often freeing it of all images. In the show at Sabrina Amrani Art Gallery, the viewer is greeted with the word ‘Alone’, first word of a text vinyl installation, a continuous abstract of thinking that leads the viewer to delve deeper into the gallery. “I’m very confident in the text in most of my work. The images are abstract and minimal in nature. To me, there is a certain charm about it, a sense of nostalgia attached to the miniatures that can tell a story.”

Following the textual piece the artist proposes a series of photographs of real spaces, but the composition and management of these architectural spaces make them pictorial pieces, as a past memory mysteriously solemn and evocative of the previous work on vinyl. The prints have long views, low light, corridors, black walls, damp underground corridors, cubes with doors leading nowhere, spaces devoid of any human presence. Light plays a decisive role in these romantic and melancholic images. Jatoi is not interested in the mere reproduction of the everyday but in the elevation of it into the symbolic.

The last body of work presented are graphite drawings that incorporate the division of space in traditional miniaturist paintings. The text takes the place of the figures and supersedes any pictorial element in this delicate study. These drawings force the viewer to “read” the picture in terms of an abstraction of reality. Thus the mental image of the read texts creates in each viewer a different mental picture. Emptying the drawings of image and filling them entirely with text, the artist exacerbates the drawing to restore its initial intention of storytelling.