The Self and the Sublime
- 12 hours ago
- 5 min read
On Faraz Aamer Khan’s Dreaming in Atlases
Saher Sohail
‘Sublime’ is an apt term to describe the work of Faraz Aamer Khan displayed recently at the Dominion Gallery, Lahore, in a solo exhibit entitled Dreaming in Atlases. This body of work might go so far as to reposition the term even. However, before we foray into the cosmic and terrestrial’s connection with the sublime, the aforementioned word begs an appropriate background and circumstance, especially in this present moment, where the word is often thrown about without a care for contextual consequence.
Eighteenth-century Romanticism was a cultural movement in Europe that responded directly to the unyielding and precise principles of Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment. Romanticism sought to bring the human experience back into the realm of the emotional, spiritual, imagined and most pertinently, the sublime. Edmund Burke’s seminal work, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ensnared the imaginations and influenced the work of Romantic artists. The word ‘beautiful’ with its implications of harmony and pleasure was too contained, too polite, and did not serve the unruly ingenuities of Romantic artists. Their attentions turned to Burke’s definition of the sublime—a term assigned to nature and its vast and violent characteristics that at once inspire awe, fear and grandeur. Such expansive, uncertain landscapes and seascapes that were often stirred by sturm and drang (1) had the capacity to make the viewer feel dwarfed by the infinite while simultaneously drawing them closer to the human spirit.
Landscape’s inimitable ability to forge this connection with the mortal soul is precisely what the works in Dreaming in Atlases call our attention to. While Khan’s land, sea and skies may not be upended by tumultuous storm and stress, they are not exempt from creating a unique understanding of the sublime through immeasurable expanses and accompanying stillness. Such stillness offers an insular moment of self-reflection. It allows us to view the external as an extension of the internal, and to reposition the sublime as something that can exist within oneself as well.
The vastness and uncertainty of human consciousness, and indeed the subconscious, is a fearful notion; to exhume associations with ‘being’ and ‘self’ from such unexplored terrains is not for the faint-hearted. To really look inwards within the self can be a task as daunting and unsettling as witnessing a sea beset with raging winds and waves, or an avalanche hurtling down jagged, towering mountains. One of the larger pieces in this exhibit entitled The Abyss Returns, depicts calm yet unfamiliar seas stretching out well beyond the horizon, illuminated by a bright star in the night sky. A work like this pushes us (the viewers) to look beyond the physical, elemental aspects of nature and to feel it as a reflection of one’s soul.
Celestial imagery and astrological mappings are also a significant trope within this body of work, perhaps most apparent in The Abyss Recedes. The viewer is continually directed to shift their attention to entities that are familiar but unknown. While heavenly bodies and their constellations take form in recognisable astrological symbols, one is pushed to question themselves: what do we really know about the stars?
Khan, in a statement from an earlier show, said, “My practice is rooted in the belief that we are the universe experiencing itself.” This tension between a knowable reality and the mysterious, infinite nature of the universe is translated onto canvas in works like The Abyss Recedes and The Abyss Returns. In Twilight’s Court also shows thick billowy clouds that conceal rather than reveal, set against a dusky sky. With a sky that is imbued with the warm glow of sunset, this particular painting stands apart from the rest because of the distinct colour palette. Thin washes of paint layered upon each other form a soft and even tonal gradation of rosy peaches and pinks, glimpses of which are caught under the lighter parts of a veil of thick cloud as well. The abstract constitution of reality is best embodied in natural elements such as cloud and sky—vaporous, shape-shifting and never quite something that can be held in the hand and felt, as something concrete and real.
This body of works, years in the making by Khan’s own admittance, is furthered in its visual complexity when one observes the variation of dimensions in the pictorial frame throughout the space. Expanse and uncertainty also manifest themselves in the smaller pieces, such as Counting Eons, just slightly bigger than a standard-sized photograph. Such a scale, with its careful balance of the celestial and the oceanic, allows for intimate viewing and spurs meditative introspection. While laboriously layering multitudinous glazes of thinned out paint, the artist seems to be grappling with something beyond the physical act of painting landscapes in works like these. He seems to be contending with time itself, not just through the practice of making the image, but through the conceptual intricacies that incite the creation of an artwork. Trained as a miniature painter, this slow, deliberate process is not entirely foreign to Khan. This historical technique borders on becoming a practice that is almost devotional, especially when the subject matter alludes to matters of spirit and the other-worldly. And though Khan employs his training as a miniature painter in a less traditional manner, his process bears the weight of a quote by filmmaker Werner Herzog, which Khan discussed in our interview regarding the show. In his 1992 documentary, Lessons of Darkness, Herzog says:
“We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilisation with which to express them, we will die out like dinosaurs.”
Herzog’s ‘adequate image’ is not signalling something that is merely passable or tolerable. It refers to an image that transcends surface levels of the human experience and excavates a profounder ‘ecstatic truth’ (2). Herzog himself is unable to extricate the feeling of the sublime from the ecstatic truth. In one of his lectures, he mentions a state of sublimity is essential to experience this encounter with ecstatic truth. Khan’s personal investment in shouldering this task demanded by Herzog is apparent in his rigorous technique and conceptual tussle.
Dreaming in Atlases is a show that persistently oscillates between what we think we recognise, know and understand, but as soon as we become content with this notion, it forces us to keep examining—to try and replace universal truth with ecstatic truth. Seemingly comfortable images can proffer uncomfortable realities—a feeling of the sublime within oneself can be simultaneously beautiful and jarring. Existence, nature, truth and self are all closely, sometimes inextricably so, intertwined in these artworks.
Artwork courtesy of the artist.
(1) German for “storm” and “stress”. Sturm und Drang, was a Counter-Enlightenment originating in Germany movement and was also a prototype for the Romantic movement.
(2) HERZOG, WERNER, and Moira Weigel. 2010. “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 17 (3): 1–12.
Saher Sohail received her BFA from the National College of Arts (NCA), Lahore in 2009, and her MA in History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2013, as a Fulbright scholar. With nearly a decade of teaching experience as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies (NCA) from 2016-2025, Sohail has also been working as an independent art writer and curator. Her primary focus in these disciplines lies in surveying closely the power structures within history, and how history is told and manipulated by these dominant systems.
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