Lenses and screens – implements for looking and seeing through – feature large in this body of Suleman Khilji’s work that offers us a visceral sense of character and place.
An enigmatic moustachioed individual, lips slightly parted, holds up a magnifying glass while peering at us through it, his eye appearing enlarged to the viewer as he does so. A familiar-looking bespectacled man blows out a barely visible trail of smoke from his mouth. His eyes are obscured by his lenses while ours are drawn to the wrinkles in his forehead that appear, with the earthy tones of Suleman Khilji’s pigments, like the topography of a landscape.
A blue screen filters our view of a woman, looking our way but through us with her lightly shaded glasses, standing at the peak of a knoll. In another painting, a man wearing a red cap sits on the ground holding a rifle in one hand, and two blurred dead birds in the other. He is looking straight at us through his tinted sunglasses.
Who are these people and why do we feel as if we know them?
The subjects of Khilji’s paintings once came from the streets of his hometown Quetta or from Lahore, where he studied art. He was drawn to individuals who presented themselves to the world with a bit of theatre. He would ask them to pause, would chat with them, sometimes photograph them and frequently end up painting them. Khilji’s interest in people has been honed not just through these impromptu street chats but nurtured by the strong culture of storytelling in his family, and by the Urdu short stories he read growing up.
His paintings share a sensibility with the short story. They offer us an absorbing view into a fully-formed character, each one featuring large within the narrative they are plucked from – of which we glimpse a tantalising event or a moment, when it seems they have noticed us looking at them. Our encounters with Khilji’s protagonists leave us feeling that we know something of their story, and of who they are.
Now at the Royal Academy in London, Khilji still takes to the streets, often in Brixton, armed with his sketchbook, an easy conversation opener. But his eye has become more filmic – taking in people and scenes from TikTok, YouTube and cinema as well as from old photographs.
Sometimes his paintings, like We might (or might not) be looking through the same lens are initiated when he presses the ‘pause’ button on a film on his phone, which he observes ‘does something so painterly to the image’. He directs his foraged characters into positions and contexts, later finding himself storyboarding these paintings in his head into an abstract sort of screenplay.
In Mnemonic Spaces (Regent's Park) Khilji works from a photograph of a hunt in Balochistan, beaming the scene into a London park. The figure of one park visitor, book in hand – an object offering another lens through which to view the world that the artist incorporates multifariously into his practice – is close to the action yet oblivious of it. The boating lake shimmers in the distance with the hint of an outline of a couple of swans painted as if dissolving through this act of transition. Our eye is pulled towards the hunter. With his cap and black garments, his long hair framing his face and his sunglasses perched just so on his nose, he looks strangely familiar.
We feel ourselves grasping at something we can’t quite fathom that lies beyond the image Khilji paints – another narrative and another place.
The surfaces of his oil paintings echo the equivocality of his protagonists. They are built up slowly, painstakingly on linen not canvas, which he says gives him a neutral colour ground and a better understanding of the space and its possibilities.
‘If I could put up only one art work in my house,’ he smiles, ‘it would be a piece of blank linen’.
On this ground he applies thin layers of earth pigments, with the glazing technique used famously by oil painters including Velázquez and Rothko to animate their paintings. Each layer of pigment mixed with oil and a thinner, requires the previous one to dry before it is applied and an absolute precision of consistency – substantive enough to impart its own pigment but thin enough to allow for an interaction with that underneath. Too dense a layer and the colour beneath is completely obscured. The result of this interplay of layered colour is a compelling optical depth to Khilji’s work – and yet more screens for his viewers to look at and through.
‘I find books as characters, characters belonging to another layer of time somewhat similar to the characters I paint on them.'
As a young boy interested in drawing, Khilji would watch elaborate scenes rendered with oil-based enamel on the backs of rickshaws at a workshop in his hometown, Quetta. Pakistan has few contemporary oil painters. Ahmed Ali Manganhar is one who made an impression on Khilji early on but this technique of layering colour is one he saw close at hand in Lahore only in the watercolour pigments of Ali Kazim who fashioned it out of his study of the Bengal School painters.
It almost sounds like a cliché to say this but it wasn’t until a student exchange trip to Paris in 2009, when a teacher insisted he spend some time in front of a Rothko painting to understand how it was made, that he began to see the possibilities of painting with oil. Since then Khilji has made the technique his own.
The surfaces of Khilji’s paintings, his use of earth pigments and their mode of application, offer a palette and a sensibility that resonate with the ground and with a particular arid landscape. Khilji’s Instagram feed, a captivating visual diary, includes reels from the windows of trains as he travelled back and forth from his native Balochistan to other parts of the country. Vast swathes of this western province of Pakistan, while rich in mineral resource – famously at one time supplying the country with most of its natural gas – lie unconnected to any grid. Its recently nomadic, mostly tribal population are spread thinly over its harsh terrain. Stroll a few miles out of its capital, Quetta, and the grainy landscape feels of another time.
Looking at the earthy backdrops in his work, and at the contours of the faces of some of his subjects it is hard not to see an echo of that landscape. We are ‘almost there’. The eponymous painting of the man in the train seat reading a story in his book, blowing smoke rings that reflect off the frame off his glasses, now begins to look like a self-portrait.
The essay Reflected Looking by Anita Dawood was commissioned on occasion of Suleman Aqeel Khilji's display Parallel in London.
Suleman Aqeel Khilji (b.1985, Quetta. Lives and works in London) uses painting to explore storytelling and the development of character. Often recounting his everyday encounters, he frames individuals as if fictional protagonists. Drawing his figures from real life, social media, films or historic sources like aged photographs, his images have a cinematic quality with nostalgia conjured through his layering of thinned earth pigments. Similar to the chance way Khilji selects his subjects, he often paints on found objects including old books. Interested in the layers of time captured by the object and by the stories within the book’s pages, he sees his act of embellishing them as a revival that bridges time and comments on the transitory nature of collective consciousness.
Khilji received his BFA from National College of Art, Lahore in 2011. He is currently pursuing his MFA from The Royal Academy of Arts, London.
His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows internationally, including: Art Dubai (Jhaveri Contemporary) (2024); No.9 Frieze Cork Street, London (2023); IVS Gallery, Karachi; Sanat Gallery, Karachi (2015); Ecole de Beaux-Arts de Paris (2015); Canvas Gallery, Karachi (2014); SOAS, London (2014).