Shaan Syed

About

Creating a tension between the graphic lines of flat hard-edge abstraction and gestural mark-making, Shaan Syed’s (b. Toronto, Canada, 1975) approach to painting is one of decoding and re-contextualising visual signs and references drawn from European and American post-modern painting, married with those of his own experience and background. As the son of a Pakistani Muslim father and a British Protestant mother, growing up in Canada, Syed explores the meanings of holding certain identities and their consequent influences for creating and looking at art. 

Syed’s painting shows the many revisions and changes undergone throughout their making, epitomising Syed’s concept of painting as “a process of reverse archaeology”, where material is added in order to uncover.  Syed repeatedly paints a stepped motif, originating from a picture of the giant spiral minaret of the Great Mosque of Samarra (Iraq, 9th c. C.E.).  

By flattening the minaret’s spiral in order to divide the picture plane, the artist creates a space informed by negotiation and reciprocity.  The artist’s painting process is a system of back and forth, whereby one side of the canvas is painted, and the other side is painted in response. This process reflects a call and response, returning to the practical purpose of a minaret (the call to prayer), and speaks to the work involved in both painting and looking.  

Syed’s distinctive motifs, materials, and references allegorise relationships of difference, reflecting on the artist’s own straddling of cultures. Often drawing comparisons and similarities across histories, in his paintings Syed explores traditions and contemporary preoccupations which have historically been considered part of vastly different worlds.