The riotous maximalism of Raqib Shaw
The artist’s tortured past yields glittering traumas in high relief, on view at an exhibition at the Gardner Museum
The painterly visions of raqib Shaw come in only one size: extra-large, whether measured by ambition, historical scope, or simply their stature. Just walking into “ballads of east and West,” Shaw’s recently opened survey exhibition at the isabella Stewart gardner museum, made me a little dizzy; almost every one of the towering works here is an assault of riotous color teeming with manic energy. if quiet contemplation is more your speed, consider yourself warned: every inch of a raqib Shaw painting lives at full volume, cranked to 11.
There’s no accounting for taste, and while i don’t particularly like Shaw’s work, i do admire it. hyperactively melodramatic fantasist epics jam-packed with gods and monsters (and almost always, Shaw himself ) are rarely my idea of a good time, but every painting here is a bonafide technical marvel. Shaw begins with a photographic image projected on a birchwood panel; he traces its details in gold enamel to create countless millimeter-deep wells. they’re the structure of the paintings, in outline. using porcupine quills and fine needles, he then fills the voids with glossy enamel paint that he’s often mixed himself to achieve his preferred colors. (in the museum’s downstairs fenway gallery, sketches and drawings help to reveal his process; a detailed photograph of one of his paintings adorns the building’s facade).
The paintings have to be made lying flat, so the little pools of paint don’t run. each one can take years to finish. the show has more than 20; Shaw has plenty of staff to help him — just to contemplate the hours of labor boggles the mind. the effect is luminous and hyper-real, with deep, rich hues only the pooling of the paint can achieve. each surface is permanently glistening, giving his fantas-magoria a surreal, almost automotive sheen. “the four Seasons Winter,” 2018-19, is a liquidy vision of violent apocalypse: a berobed Shaw teeters on the blackened limb of a dead tree above a mound of corpses, screaming as he’s torn to pieces by glittering demons.
But dazzle can be blinding, and his penchant for maximalist excess threatens to consume the ideas at the heart
of his work. born in Kolkata in 1974, he was raised in the indian city of srinigar in the Himalayan Vale of Kashmir amid the region’s communities of buddhists, Hindus, muslims, and Christians (shaw was raised muslim, but went to Catholic school).
years of instability prompted by competing claims to the region by india and pakistan brought violent insurgency, and in 1989 shaw’s family fled to new delhi; Kashmir — a place he holds tight to as “paradise on earth” — is the lost eden of his painterly vision. it often fills the background of one extravagant scene or another, whether ablaze, or a smoking ruin, or under bombardment. in “seeking simurgh,” 2018-19, shaw sits in contemplative repose, tending a bonsai tree on an intricate carpet, as fighter jets bomb the quiltwork city seen through the ornate arched windows of his refuge.
the blunt dichotomy here — violent trauma as the foundation of his creative urge, always rumbling in the background — is as subtle and suggestive as shaw seems to get. in its relatively simple tensions, it is, to me, the best picture in the show. A handful of others are evocatively restrained, at least by shaw’s standards. “that night in Xanadu, When the birds Were set Free,” 2019-20, darkly shimmering and serene, prompts notions of elegy and loss despite its sparkle; it hints at real depth.
often, though, shaw’s paintings feel like an assault on the viewer, their heavy layering of reference, figure, narrative, and paint itself bundling up into a cacophony of image and idea. shaw is fond of a deep, glossy azureblue; the skintone most often given to shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and creation. it’s no surprise that shaw uses the color in his self-portrait portrayals of his own tortured creativity. do yourself the favor of giving the paintings a good long look first and reading their titles later; “self portrait in the study at peckham (A Reverie After Antonello da messina’s saint Jerome) ii,” 2013-2015, depicts a blueskinned shaw draped in floral finery in front of a heavy tome as cartoonish skeletons creep from every part of the frame, scraps of bloody flesh dangling from their bones.
the piece, a compositional replica of the Renaissance master da messina’s restrained and earthy 15th century ode to both architectural form and divine learning, is an overwrought doover that made me suppress a cringe. pivot to the nearby “the Annunciation (After Carlo Crivelli),” 2013-14, a tableaux of sparkly pandemonium overrun with monkeys that replicates the form and proportion of Crivelli’s sombre 1486 devotional, and you’ll find more of the same.
to be clear, i’ve never thought of art history as sacred text to remain inviolate, and i’m all for contemporary reimaginings of old masters — especially now, as european canons are rightfully challenged from all corners of the globe. shaw comes by this pursuit honestly; after his family fled srinigar, he traveled to london and saw the dutch master Hans Holbein’s “the Ambassadors” at the national gallery. it prompted him to enroll at london’s Central st. martin’s art school to study painting in 1993, which gave him easy access to the painters he would come to revere: panini, tintoretto, and the intricate, often-nightmarish visions of pieter breugel the elder.
His work is a furious merging of his dual lives, but he engages these works with simple polemics that make them seem like superficial name-checks rather than deep explorations. i can’t decide whether the da messina and Crivelli tributes, if that’s what to call them, are meant as parodies or homages, or are just the product of generalized inspiration. i find them unsatisfying, however technically masterful; they end up torqued into an oeuvre that often feels hysterical and chaotic, with a level of melodrama that at times flirts with kitsch.
Really, shaw’s central concern is the never-ending despoilment of his Himalayan homeland by violence and political strife, and his lifelong struggle as a diasporic person unable to make himself fully at home anywhere else. An enduring visual trope in his work is the extravagant garden he’s built in his south london studio, a contained sliver of paradise that he keeps safe from the world.
there’s a metaphor here, certainly his clearest and most powerful. marvel, because it deserves it, at “A summer of sombre stirrings in the garden of blissful solitude,” 2021-22, his painterly ode to the captive idyll he’s built inside the studio walls; its lush and intricate mosaic of color fills the frame. only a slim channel of sky gives way to a distant london skyline strung along the meandering thames.
it is, i think, shaw’s clearest and most contemplative allegory of the experience of feeling disconnected from a new home and the futility of re-capturing the old one within it. the piece had not only virtuosity but clarity, an inviting somberness despite the dazzle. shaw’s overstuffed pictures so often left me, the viewer, feeling pushed aside, that this was welcome refuge: A picture open to contemplation, and room to come inside.