Salman Khalid

    Sal Shivji was born in the East African country of Tanzania; famous for its big game and bright weather, Sal could never quite shake the shifting rhythm of the shadows dancing by the leaves, or the gossamer-thin changes in hue in the bright sun of his home. At first unconsciously, and later intentionally, his paintings evoke the same inflections of line and color that his younger years etched into his brain. His work often starts as doodles and sketches. In love with the golden ratio, his first stroke is often a swooping curve which serves as the establishing landmark. The ensuing details are then built upon this foundation. Later in his process, he combines and reconfigures multiple sketches together into the base for his paintings; finally, he adds color and texture.

     Shivji’s work finds its special character through its marriage of abstract expressionism and surrealism. The surrealist’s fascination was one of intellectual juxtaposition. The special quality of their work came from disrupting the formation of context and meaning or having none present where it was expected. Magritte, for example, in his “treachery of images” (24 × 32, 1928–1929) creates discrepancy through alienating the visual contents (the pipe) from the writing content (This is not a pipe). Shivji however, in keeping with Pollock, has discarded literal depiction entirely and so must resort to a more primal though not any lesser-than means to create his juxtaposition.

     Like Color Field paintings, Shivji’s work does not emphasize the experience of looking so much as create it, and so, like Color Field paintings, his work is only realized through the action of sustained observation. This effect becomes beautifully apparent in his “Repose” (30 x 36, 2024). With only oppositions of color, and subtleties of line, melodramatic greens ground themselves beside rigid unbothered blues. The bright gaping oranges upon closer inspection seem battered; quieted by textures of brown. The gradating tones within each block of color gives each section a hushed sense of dimensionality. When appreciated as a broader whole the work gives a sense of warping disquiet; as the eye shifts from place to place so does the assumed parallax. Shapes become flat, then quiet hills, then sharp mountains, and flat again as they shift from the center of one’s vision to the edges again, or in context to what lines and masses they are considered beside. This is reminiscent of both Tanzania’s physical geography — containing Africa’s highest point Mount Kilimanjaro alongside plains and grasslands — and the array of vivid, fluttering, Tanzanian shadows, textures and colors that to this day collude together within Shivji’s mind.

    The disrupted formation of meaning then, that the surrealists accented, is carried forward into the pure visual space of the abstract expressionists to render his home, not merely as a set of facts, but as a delicate obsession comprised of personal fascinations. Magritte taught us that a collection of brushstrokes is not in fact the object it purports to represent. Shivji then — by entering into the domain of the abstract expressionists — continues this lesson. He teaches us that a place is not merely a set of objects: trees and mountains and cities, it is also a set of experience: heat on your skin, blinding color on your eyes, and the invitation of rest within the canopy of shadows.