Absence of God - Raqib Shaw

Raqib Shaw’s paintings in Absence of God are sublime in all senses of the word.

In their scale and content, they reference the sublime apocalyptic works of the Romantic artists, John Martin and Francis Danby, which miniaturised human beings emphasising our powerlessness in the face of God and Nature as part of their exploration of the sensations of immensity, darkness and terror. Shaw uses similar methods – densely populated scenes set against backdrops of classical ruins – to engage similar sensations of decline and fall.

But Shaw’s paintings are also sublime in their technique and beauty. Working with metallic industrial paints, Shaw creates a marbling effect through use of a porcupine quill and outlines each detail of his compositions in gold. When glitter and gemstones are added to the mix the whole shimmers in a riot of colour, which although slightly kitsch, nevertheless is harmoniously blended towards beauty.

When combined with the monstrous content of Shaw’s works - the intense violent and sexual nature of its manga-like imagery – a bitter-sweet paradox is established which, in light of the exhibition’s title and his anthropomorphic imagery, could reflect a world of harmonies and beauty formed with intricacy and inter-connectivity yet red raw in tooth and claw.

Shaw draws on the works of Hieronymus Bosch in depicting the monstrous beauty found in the absence of God. He finds there a similar paradox; Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights also being Hell. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his sculpture Adam, which features a human figure with a bird’s head, its mouth and genitals swarming with parasites, mounted by a large, bejewelled lobster. Adam removes the monstrous from the beautiful and represents the fall of humanity into the bestial.

Shaw’s work in its focus on the monstrous and its referencing of past masterpieces has parallels with the Goya-based installations and vandalisations of the Chapman Brothers. However, the paradoxes that Shaw establishes through the beauty of his violent compositions seem to avoid the double negatives of, for example, the Chapman Brother’s Insult to Injury series where their defacing of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings seems to revere desecration and thus reverse the intent of Goya’s work.

Shaw’s paintings counter many of the stereotypical critiques of contemporary art. They are conceptual works requiring traditional painterly skills in terms of composition and technique. They are figurative narrative paintings which form abstract harmonious visual wholes. They are iconoclastic while referencing a broad multi-cultural art history. In short, they are sublime.

Absence of God, Raqib Shaw, White Cube Hoxton Square, 20 May – 4 July and Kunsthalle Vienna, 19 August – 27 September 2009

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David Byrne - Road to Nowhere.