Hush…Artist at Work Wind Without Rain - New works by Aniwar Mamat
Karen.Smith
2011.08
Aniwar Mamat is a serious abstract painter, one of a tiny minority within an art world dominated by figurative art, who has systematically pursued a unique linguistic path through a career that has its roots in the dawning of the ’85 New Art Movement. In 1987, completing his studies at the University of the Minorities in Beijing, Aniwar’s artistic impulses and the small number of works he produced outside of the classroom were as innovative, as avant-garde as any other of that time. Abstract art, as a means to achieving artistic freedom from the tenets of Revolutionary Realism and the accent upon life drawing, was the most obvious, choice for “new artists” set on pursuing individual visions of art. From members of the No-Name Group to individuals such as Zhu Jinshi, Wang Luyan, Gu Dexin and Wang Peng, the purity of form, the formal qualities of paint on canvas or on paper, freed from “content” made both a statement about their interests and allowed a true personality to flourish across a picture plane. For Aniwar, such a choice was not so “political” and, therefore, not so black and white: he had the advantage of artistic roots within the cultural framework of the Autonomous Uighur province of Xinjiang that made the transition into pure form as natural as breathing.
Drawing on these roots, as Aniwar’s understanding of abstract as a language in art evolved through myriad trials and errors encountered, his abstract paintings began to achieve a sensual coupling of light and colour that speaks of myriad emotions. In the 1990s, following a number of experiments with painterly installations and assemblage of found objects in the late 1980s, women became a chief source of inspiration for a series of mixed media paintings, using gouache, watercolour and gold leaf of thick Korean paper. But these works did not make a return to figuration. Instead, they explored languid curves, the aura of fickle moods and suggestions of tantalizingly veiled expression which to Aniwar’s thinking were the very essence of “woman”. This interest also encouraged, for a short while, an interest in photography. Similar to an early intervention from 1988, where he photographed a piece of wood—the relevance of which became clear in 2008 in the exhibition Subtlety also at Platform—his approached emphasised the subtle nuances expressed in minute physical details, which could be reconstructed in the studio to affect an intimate portrait; a subtle, abstract essence.
Where Aniwar was trained as an oil painter certain portions of its conventions have served him well in the course of his career: certainly in his interest in its innate physical properties, and fascination with the effects of colour on the senses; the emotional play generated by the convergence of these two elements. This influence is most visible in the warp and weft effect of long, rectangular brush marks that Aniwar has long used to define a pictorial space. This mark continues to be a defining character of his works. In Wind without Rain, Aniwar achieves anything between solidity and fluidity; opaqueness and lucidity, and a spatial depth through the rich contrast of colour that the positioning of the mark achieves. It is this mark that played an important role in the early development of the “Zhanzi” paintings.But this approach is contrasted, and complemented, by a second, somewhat diametrically opposite to the measured pace of the “block” compositions. In an experimental phase that began in the early 2000s, Aniwar began working with the elements; directly under showers of rain and in high winds allowing these natural forces to touch and alter the surface of the paintings. In this way, he introduced a seam of randomness into the unfolding of an artwork, such that no trained hand can achieve; just as despite Kandinsky’s best efforts, he found it impossible to return to, or to recreate the spontaneity of a child’s intuitive expression.
In both of thesevaried approaches, whether using acrylic pigments or coloured inks, oil or gold and silver leaf, Aniwar is an extremely fine colourist. He contrasts bright primary pigments with subdued blues—ultramarine, monastral, azure—and a cool palette of greens against hot pinks, reds and splashes of yellow. To realise satisfactorily an elemental painting, transparency is essential. Its balance with opacity gives weight where there is darkness and brilliant clarity where there is light. These compositions exude a sense of time that is quite different from the studied sobriety of relations between the stolid rectangular brush marks of the “geometrical” compositions. It is not just time unfolding, but the seasons too, for some works contain areas where films of paint have been allowed to build,as layer upon layer created at different times of the day or of the year, to a suffusion of warm, scorching even, sunlight. In other portions of the paintings, winter clearly has its claws in the year: fine cracks glaze the surface, and some flakes of paint have already been shed.
Aniwar’s paintings are first-person stories, diary entries signalled not by words but by emotions and impulsive responses to the delights and trials of the world. The paintings are evidence of a pictorial alchemy driven by a passion for a pure, essential form of visual expression, and how these elements and interactions communicate an emotional journey. Aniwar’s paintings appeal to the senses, to the poetry in the soul, which was at the height of the ’85 New Art Movement terribly unfashionable. As the art scene has expanded, and as the dominance of western tastes for the political in art have plateaued out, there is again room for expressive painters to find an audience.
Although the abstract qualities of Aniwar’s works make a most immediate impression, he sees them less as abstract than as the outcome of philosophical explorations of visual experience. This experience is a Zen-like conundrum that is at once simple and complex. It refers to how we see colour, form, and space, and how we open ourselves up to (or resist) experience. ‘Where paintings conventionally are two-dimensional the way people view them conforms to a single habit. You probably use less than ten percent of your entire physical potential. I want to get people more involved.’ This concern eventually led to the invention of the zhanzi paintings. But in terms of Aniwar’s works, fundamentallycentres on how we are able (or not) to put heart before mind: to respond directly to what we see as art without first pigeonholing it. This has been made difficult in recent decades because post-modernism altered the perception of vision irrevocably. But Aniwar delves into this phenomenon too: his insistence on aesthetics and spiritual animus in his art subverts what we anticipate from a contemporary art work. It asks us to put the ego aside, to quieten the mind and to submit our sense to the suspension of time and space that occurs when we enter his pictorial space. That his art feels timeless, neither bound by, or to, the era in which it is created, is a measure of the process brought to realising each piece. It is an unhurried pace that involves hours of silent contemplation of the placing of one mark against another, allowing them time to become acquainted, and to decide if they really belong together before they are fixed for eternity. The preference for a conscious slowness, the antithesis of the velocity of contemporary life, means that paintings can take months to achieve depth through layers, blocks of space, voids sculpted by an invisible qi, in which the air vibrates with the aura of colour and the texture of the strokes. He pursues his exploration without artifice or game-plan; except that of unravelling the essence of visual language through painting, drawing and, occasionally, photography.
The drawings are special;credited as resembling entries in a diary, but they, too, challenge and alter the viewers’ perceptions, and the nature of viewing. They produce their own vibrations, with or without the rich patches of gold leaf that are often inserted between the steely glint of the humble lead pencil, which is Aniwar’s preferred drawing tool. The drawings open a door to the artist’s personal experience.
In 2008 for Subtlety, Aniwar presenteda mix of paintings, drawings, and of photography; a group of works that were simultaneously independent and inter-related. There was a marvellous aura of harmony common to all, and a surprising resonance between the emotions and “content” that were evoked: between moods, landscapes, psychological arenas, dream states, or pure illusions.
In 2009, for the group exhibition Music to My Eyes at Today art Museum, following the specific relation of its theme to sound, Aniwar chose to take his viewers deep into his visual world in silence. To achieve this he created an insulated space in which all external sound was temporarily suspended.To achieve this suspension, Aniwar physically enveloped the audience in a pictorial space by creating a three-dimensional painting that surrounded them on all sides. Within the depths of the enclosed space, it was not canvas that served as the ground for the painting but “zhanzi”; the thick felt blankets commonly used by ink painters who place them underneath a sheet of rice paper to blot excess ink as it soaks into the paper. For his work, Aniwar chose a thicker industrial version of thezhanzi felt to line the walls of the space from top to bottom and all around. In the way that Aniwar structures paintings using that striking rectangular mark, the zhanzi were individually rolled into tight tubes and hung in rows horizontally, with barely a hair’s breadth between them. In this way, they also functioned as structural elements of the painting. The rolled tubes were randomly daubed with one striking stroke laid horizontally across its curved surface in varying shades of blue. The visual effect was intended to be like floating in an expanse of ocean or a vast cloudless sky. The silence that engulfed the space was intended to intensify the visual experience. The silent sanctuary played with the audience’s awareness of natural sounds and rhythms in the world, primarily the rise and fall of the breath, the pounding of one’s heart, and the roar of nothing in the ears.In the artist’s words, this work was ‘a reworking of a personal experience in 1984 when I was preparing for the entrance examination to art school. I was working in a carpet factory and would go alone into the wool dying rooms to read. Because the room was filled with wool, every sound was absorbed to total silence: except my breath, the sound of blood in my veins. I wanted to let viewers experience that for themselves.’
Following this first experiment with zhanzi Aniwar was encouraged to do more using this material; to find ways to create a more striking impact of it as a painted surface, as well as more durable ways to develop compositions on this soft malleable surface. Zhanzi are not formed of woven fibres but of high-compression and cohesion that takes place when wool is boiled. Aniwar spent a long period of time in 2009 in a wool mill working with the workers to experiment with the creation of “canvas” grounds using wool. This experience was interspersed with a residency in Australia and extensive travel in Europe and America. From one, he learned of new nuances of light and ‘weather’; from the other of the long history of painting, and of the place of abstract art in western culture. Both served to renew Aniwar’s commitment to his chosen path of expression and enriched his understanding of the efforts required to cover his desired ground.
Aniwar has never been a prolific artist, spending at times months on a single work. The exhibition Wind Without Rainrepresents a group of works that were produced in the last three years, but that are the result of a life-time’s engagement.