I bought a painting from this year’s Degree Show at the NCA. A bar of margarine in a porcelain butter crock. Not only was its rendering impressive, its ‘subject’ too was a factor in my decision to acquire this small canvas. Oil paint was applied by the young graduate as if it were indeed butter.

This delightful way of handling paint, especially oil or acrylic was becoming a rare sight lately, but with the immense success of Salman Toor, the attraction for ‘the act of painting’ loosely, sensitively and superbly done is seen here. Khilji is among a few in Pakistani art, gifted with the ability to play with paint and push it for exciting gains. Or risks.

Some works on paper at Khliji’s solo show are named Remains of the Day, but to describe the maker, another title of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, An Artist of the Floating World is suitable. Since his graduation from the NCA in 2011, Khilji has been working. With each new exhibition, artists’ residency and project, he is investigating the art of painting. For a number of years, he had regular models, especially a man working at the NCA cafeteria. He has painted him again and again, and in each work, one came across the same face and the figure as a new entity. Looking at that body of work, and his recent works on display, one can only speculate what Suleman Aqeel Khilji is trying to portray. Is it models or something else through his subject?

This reminds me of an encounter with that fabulous master of tactile surfaces, Jamil Naqsh. This young critic asked him in the summer of 1997, if the painter is ever tired of doing the same composition of woman and pigeon. Naqsh grazed his finger around the leaf of a plant next to him, saying “I have been painting this too for some years, once I am able to make it, I will do something else”. The subject, props, places, people are important for many, and one often gets inquiries (in an inquisitive tone): if the reference an artist used belonged to him/ her. Was it a personal picture or picked from the social media? Or if the artist is justifying his/ her model/ reference, or manipulating, exploiting them – a criticism usually made against Iqbal Hussain and his depiction of women from the red-light district of Lahore.

For some artists, the background of their sources, their images, is important, in fact the context completes the content. But for others engaging with the act of making is the most – if not the only - substantial detail to consider.

One felt this while talking to Suleman Aqeel Khilji about the genealogy of his images. He depicts a girl, a student from the NCA, in work attire; the waiter; a fellow artist; some security guards; the sanitary worker from his neighbourhood; and a few other individuals. But the question is how much (or even if) a viewer needs to know about the identity of his figures, in order to appreciate his paintings; or the location of some of those being in Balochistan, or the artist’s studio, a shared work space, an urban site in Lahore. Would information of this sort add to the meaning of paintings on display or hamper it - since no artist has ever produced works for art historians, researchers, archivists – let alone critics?

Like when we see Las Meninas by Velasquez today, we normally identify characters in the canvas but we are bewitched by the way Spanish master constructed the various ingredients of his imagery.

Perhaps, there is no answer. Thankfully so. If one focuses on the history of Suleman Khilji, one starts deciphering parts of his imagery as codes. The artist was born in Quetta, joined the NCA as a student in 2007 and after his degree show stayed on in Lahore. Probably, the move from his hometown to the capital city of the Punjab, is significant, because for some Godforsaken reason everyone tries to identify creative individuals with their original towns. Some still connect Iqbal and Faiz with Sialkot, others link Intezar Hussain and Nasir Kazmi to towns in the UP, not realising that rather than their early years at their birthplaces, the origin of these geniuses could be their arrival in another city, a centre of art and culture that enhanced their vision and words.

More than the association with hometowns, it is their experience of being away (shared by many who spent years in exile, such as Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Pablo Neruda, Joseph Brodsky, Faiz Ahmed Faiz) that formulates their diction. Two important and recurring motifs of Suleman Khilji’s paintings are plastic shopping bags and the corrugated sheets used for shelters. Both these objects frequent his visuals (oil on linen, and prints and pencils on paper). Somehow the title of Khilji’s exhibition, Be-Longing, indicates the state of these products/ images: emerging from an origin, a factory, a warehouse, a godown, but dispersed across territories. The blue striped shopping bags, remarkably captured by Khilji, and the corrugated sheet mostly used as roof for abode settlement relate to everywhere and nowhere.

More particularly, the plastic bags, recognised due to their patterns, colours, size, are found everywhere but are not from a specific address. These are embodiments of travel.

One finds segments of personal travels, disbanded vehicles, strange or familiar characters, varied places rendered in Khilji’s paintings on linen and on the covers of some old books. Segments of an abandoned landscape with a dysfunctional car, do refer to certain locations and situations, but these also serve to transcend temporary check posts. Like when we see Las Meninas by Velasquez today, we normally identify characters in the canvas but are bewitched by the way Spanish master constructed the various ingredients of his imagery, when seen on the walls of the art gallery, Suleman Khilji rises above the demarcation of medium, description of address, even the emblem of a cause because these exist in another reality, a fragmented one.

The disintegration of pictorial space, arguably, is not related as much to the content of the work (it could be a landscape of contemporary existence, especially if seen in the context of dilapidated vehicles appearing repeatedly), as embedded in the craft pf the painter. His application of paint in patches reveals the sheer pleasure the artist took in his work. The same sense of pleasure is present on the faces and bodies of his models, who are posing amid ravaged backgrounds, fleeting atmospheres and barren spaces. Suleman Khilji has successfully excavated a great level of beauty in a subject otherwise not associated with this word, lke a torn piece of corrugated sheet ‘floating’ on the pale planes of a valley, looking like a boat sailing on the surface of the sea, like the artist floating in his world.

The exhibition will run from March 11 to April 2 at Dominion Gallery.

The author is an art critic based in Lahore