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Lot Essay
Deftly traversing between the media of painting, photography, video and installation, Rashid Rana is one of the leading artistic voices working out of Pakistan. His works have been showcased internationally in numerous venues and most recently alongside Piet Mondrian, Agnes Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Andrea Gursky in the Grid<>Matrix exhibition held in 2006. It is the aesthetic concept of the grid exploring the language of minimalism and geometric abstraction which serves as the link that connects Rana's work to his mentor Zahoor ul Akhlaq and to the artists above.
A Day in the Life of Landscape is one of Rana's most conceptually challenging works and can be experienced on multiple levels. It is highly referential. At its most basic, it tweaks Neo-miniaturism, by using a digital version of a miniature (the pixel) to proclaim to the larger art community that currents of contemporary Pakistani art move well beyond this particular genre. (This is also something that Rana more pointedly critiques in his 2002 work I Love Miniatures, which depicts the Mughal image of Shah Jahan from a composite of billboards).
The grid as well as the pixel in this work also becomes an exercise of perception. The work transforms as one zooms closer into it. The whole work only becomes legible as a landscape from a distance. These vibrant digital prints oscillate between the whole and the fragment with the viewer constantly moving across a perceptual threshold attempting to pluck a cohesive image from the sum of its parts. As with the Post-Impressionist style of work that Rana references, from a distance one sees a seamless landscape. From the midpoint, the work breaks down into a mass of colors --a nether state. Up close, the work regains its structure where pixel replaces the brushstroke.
Rana ironically subverts an iconic image, Rural Canal, by the beloved Lahore school painter Khalid Iqbal (b. 1929), whose benign works were largely unaffected during the Islamicization drive under the regime of General Zia ul Haq to root out decadent Western influences from the country. Unbeknownst to Zia, Iqbal's work is a nationalist ode to Punjab. With the dualism of the large romanticized image of Lahore, which on closer inspection reveals a mosaic of urban Lahore, Rana has composed this pastoral and painterly image with gritty photos of metropolitan Lahore complete with traffic, roadways, street signs and congestion. The work cleverly pits the real against the poeticized, the imported against the local, revealing the true colors of each interpretation.
The double take is encountered most vehemently in Rashid Rana's apparently familiar reassuring digital works. You begin to see the relationship between the large picture and the small picture, ironic meanings bubble up which are witty, affectionate, caustic and melancholic. Rashid Rana scrutinizes the niceness of appearances and exposes the shallowness of our assumptions. A Day in the Life of Landscape mimics the serenity of the landscape guru, Khalid Iqbal, which turns into dust and pollution once the viewer is close enough to see the tiny images (Y. Dalmia and S. Hashmi, Memory, Metaphor, Mutations : Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 34).
A Day in the Life of Landscape is one of Rana's most conceptually challenging works and can be experienced on multiple levels. It is highly referential. At its most basic, it tweaks Neo-miniaturism, by using a digital version of a miniature (the pixel) to proclaim to the larger art community that currents of contemporary Pakistani art move well beyond this particular genre. (This is also something that Rana more pointedly critiques in his 2002 work I Love Miniatures, which depicts the Mughal image of Shah Jahan from a composite of billboards).
The grid as well as the pixel in this work also becomes an exercise of perception. The work transforms as one zooms closer into it. The whole work only becomes legible as a landscape from a distance. These vibrant digital prints oscillate between the whole and the fragment with the viewer constantly moving across a perceptual threshold attempting to pluck a cohesive image from the sum of its parts. As with the Post-Impressionist style of work that Rana references, from a distance one sees a seamless landscape. From the midpoint, the work breaks down into a mass of colors --a nether state. Up close, the work regains its structure where pixel replaces the brushstroke.
Rana ironically subverts an iconic image, Rural Canal, by the beloved Lahore school painter Khalid Iqbal (b. 1929), whose benign works were largely unaffected during the Islamicization drive under the regime of General Zia ul Haq to root out decadent Western influences from the country. Unbeknownst to Zia, Iqbal's work is a nationalist ode to Punjab. With the dualism of the large romanticized image of Lahore, which on closer inspection reveals a mosaic of urban Lahore, Rana has composed this pastoral and painterly image with gritty photos of metropolitan Lahore complete with traffic, roadways, street signs and congestion. The work cleverly pits the real against the poeticized, the imported against the local, revealing the true colors of each interpretation.
The double take is encountered most vehemently in Rashid Rana's apparently familiar reassuring digital works. You begin to see the relationship between the large picture and the small picture, ironic meanings bubble up which are witty, affectionate, caustic and melancholic. Rashid Rana scrutinizes the niceness of appearances and exposes the shallowness of our assumptions. A Day in the Life of Landscape mimics the serenity of the landscape guru, Khalid Iqbal, which turns into dust and pollution once the viewer is close enough to see the tiny images (Y. Dalmia and S. Hashmi, Memory, Metaphor, Mutations : Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, New Delhi, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 34).