Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: January 25, 2019 | 
| 中文
Suleman Khilji
The room is small, with yellow light pooling on the floor. Shelves and tables are brimming with dog eared sketchbooks and wrinkled tubes of paint, and it is here, in an old wrought iron chair that I find Suleman Khilji, whose work I have only ever seen before in the hushed fluorescence of art galleries. His name brings to mind soft, transitioning landscapes and sensitive paintings of oddball characters. A local sweeper in a jaunty green hat and ditsy sunglasses, standing tall as if he is the last king on earth, or a chaaye wala in a black leather jacket, posing like all the television stars he has ever gawked at, set against hazy backgrounds from Quetta, where the artist spent most of his childhood. The sweeper, whose name he says is Yusuf Maseeh, is slowly taking shape on a canvas, chin high and posture proud against an ethereal Titianesque sky. Khilji's quest to find and paint these strange kindred beings is a deeply intimate process. He loves to paint from life, immortalizing these shabby, magnificent men within playful renderings of his childhood city, recreated from imagination and photographs. “A painter is not just a painter,” he observes. “A painter is an investigator. All paintings are questions and hidden ideas that the artist coaxes into revelation with every mark he reverently presses onto a surface.”
Above his head on a ledge, a gigantic canvas rests hidden from view. He does not want to look at this particular painting for a while, he tells me, and this vulnerability is delightfully astounding considering his oeuvre. When he graduated from the National College of Arts in 2011, Suleman Khilji's degree show left every critic, viewer and buyer enraptured. Large nightscapes in oil donned the canvases: a shrouded figure beckoned the viewer, gleaming soft yet menacing in a halo of red light. A homeless man sat by the roadside, awash in blue spilling from a street lamp, stray dogs flocking around him like disciples around a messiah. Figures of the night loomed, their faces distraught, surrounded by distorted shadows. Khilji's obsession was storytelling; folktales in Quetta he had been regaled with as a child seeped into his adulthood, and accompanied him to Lahore. His practice has evolved and deepened, but the lore remains, every face a character, every landscape blurring and morphing as if intangible - a picture of loss and transience.
The painter's love for live drawing bloomed at a young age, and he tells me of late nights in Quetta, where he would hunker over cups of black tea in local chaaye khaanas, filling page after page with drawings of men who would frequent these tea places, an intimate documentation of real life stories that were playing out around him. At the esteemed Vasl Residency in Karachi, his search for tales and narratives remained the same, but the landscape shifted. Cinder blocks and concrete structures found their way into his poetic meanderings on paper and canvas, and teaching drawing to young pupils as part of the residency informed his work anew, which eventually crescendoed into the show See View in 2016. An image of a forlorn, floating “shopper” bag against a fading seascape formed a new kind of character, the imagery moving towards metaphors of impermanence.
"All you need as an artist is an origin. A singular urgency to create, a point of departure, a spark. All you know is that it is there, alive and burning. I am always looking for a tempting image to paint. That image will always be related to time, to space, to the ever morphing state of transience." He is rifling through a sketchbook as he tells me this, showing me intricately inked calligraphy, hastily scribbled phrases he might have heard in passing, and drawing upon drawing of people and places. I inquire about a painting he made of a languishing royal figure, after the miniature The Dying Inayat Khan. Khilji's appropriation of the work was painted onto his own used bedsheet, with the text "Keep Moving" printed in large block letters, among a smattering of printed toy cars and buses. We talk of Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness, and how being alive in this era is to be constantly on the move. He tells me of waking up every morning confronted by the urgent "Keep Moving" on his bed, and then travelling in buses, watching emaciated people from the lower middle class, wasting away but without the luxury of doing so in the warmth of a bed, like Inayat Khan. This regal, withering man at the brink of death has made many an appearance in Khilji's work, driving a fading taxi, lounging beneath floating shopping bags and dandelion husks, becoming a spearhead for this movement of majestic yet mortal characters that are slowly losing themselves to the inevitable act of ceasing to be.
Suleman Khilji has displayed his extraordinary work both locally and internationally, and has found himself a place among the most prodigious contemporary artists from Pakistan. I am moved by the ritualistic quality of the artist's process, and his riveting pursuit of secrets and stories. In the sanctity of this space, he is concocting nothing short of magic, breathing life into unnoticed characters that might otherwise be swallowed whole by time. A verse from a Rainer Maria Rilke poem makes its way to me:
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
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