Palette Art Gallery’s upcoming summer show “Reflections in Time” opens to public on the 18th October 2018.
While the artist weaves together both representation and abstraction, he also melds architectural landscapes with still life, creating paintings steeped in prodigious antecedents. The characteristics of transparency and opacity are juxtaposed; creating puzzles that meld liquidity with solidity. Portraits of some of India's best known Palaces and Monuments (the tombs of Isa Khan and Laxmi Vilas Palace, the Fatehpur Sikri Fort, Jaswant Thada Jodhpur and Sheesh Mahal Jaipur) are glimpsed through scrims of decorative glassware which turn their stoic masonry into a melting array of pigments. Khan indianizes the tradition of the Vanitas Vanitatum, the beginning of still life painting in Holland in the 16th Century, when collections of objects represented the fleeting nature of mortal existence and painters competed against each other for the most astute verisimilitude.
The graceful domes of monuments in India have been captured in oil many times, but Tauseef Khan adds another layer of perception to the image. In his canvasses, the architecture is tactile, hyper-real and vivid, but shaped in places through the glass of a wine goblet. Through the screen of the glassware, light distorts, patterns are amplified and new shapes created, evoking something new altogether. Tauseef’s fabulous painting reminds you of a truth we all tend to overlook: each and everything we see is our perception of its reality.