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Chris Townsend – Critic/Lecturer/Author
On Sacha Jafri’s latest collection – His Unconscious Adventure – ‘The Spaces Between Us’

We do not think of cities as magical places - unless, perhaps, we are very young or a newcomer still awaiting, innocently, the displacement of illusion by cynicism. We do not think of life itself as a magical experience – unless, perhaps, we are five years old, or eighteen years old. Even magicians do not see life as something containing, let alone run by, the warped rules of their art. It is the emotional, expressive, driving out of this cynicism that accompanies maturity that makes Sacha Jafri’s recent paintings so exciting. Jafri strips away the accumulation of experience that would tell us otherwise to reveal that there are places and moments where cities, and our lives, are indeed magical – yet, unlike the magician, he too seems enchanted by his creations.

Jafri defines himself as a “magical realist” – a phrase that evokes the work of an older contemporary, Peter Doig. Whilst Doig remains an influence, far more important are literary sources such as Marquez and Rushdie. These writers make magical the mundane stuff of everyday life by the intrusion of an event that is itself quotidian, but which seems wholly extraordinary to the narrator. Looking at Jafri’s paintings of the Thames – Westminster and The Embrace at Tower Bridge – this city dweller, jaded by experience, once again sees urban life as enchanted, as if seeing it for the first time through the eyes of a child or a young lover.

This enchantment with locality, coupled with the romantic sensuality of his subjects, brings Jafri into the orbit of a painter such as Jeffrey Camp. Jafri’s London paintings remind me of the way in which Camp, in the 1980s, painted the city as though every moment, every space were charged with possibility. This affinity is interesting for Jafri. He follows a line of semi-figurative art principally concerned with representing our subjective experience of the world. This personal address to the world, however, does not presume it as a stable entity. Anything but! One of the greatest steps forward in Jafri’s new paintings is the way in which they play with both space and time, weaving it, arresting it, speeding it up. Looking at Strolling along the Banks of the Seine I began to question the moment in which the image existed. It was as though Jafri had managed to paint the experience of watching a time-lapse film of the framed space. The whole day from dawn to dusk flew past in an accelerated, compressed image. Such, indeed is our experience of the city; we do not control the time and space around us, far less its flow. But in the foreground, Jafri’s linked-arm lovers, strolling but barely moving, seem indifferent to the rush around them. That gesture of union isolated them from the flow of time – just as our experience of time and space shifts when we are with a lover. The couple were simultaneously part of the “projection” of recorded time, and its distracted, almost uninterested, spectators.

Elsewhere, Jafri most successfully interweaves space and time, creating an extraordinary palimpsest of the experience of everyday life. In Summer Carnival planes of experience snake in and out of each other, time and space are wholly pliable, nothing is too fantastic to be impossible. This is life, shifting and unstable: here are experience and feeling rather than the stasis of representation, engagement rather than reflection. At this point in his career some of Jafri’s earlier experiments on the boundary of abstraction and figuration start to make sense: he is now a painter of modern life. Jafri’s vision deals with one aspect of that life, one that is familiar to us, and yet from which we are estranged. It is his task as a painter to refresh our eyes and our imaginations.

Chris Townsend.

Paris

2006
Oil on Board
102cm x 69cm

Windy Day

2006
Oil on Board
185cm x 123cm

Westminster

2006
Oil on Board
155cm x 155cm

The Embrace at Tower Bridge

2006
Oil on Board
185cm x 123cm

Cotton Pickers

2006
Oil on Board
155cm x 123cm

Extreme Paparazzi

2004
Oil on Board
123cm x 123cm

One Summer's Morning

2004
Oil on Board
155cm x 123cm

Circus

2006
Oil on Board
155cm x 123cm