Asim Butt's Profile

My studio practice gives precedence to questions of aesthetics and the crafting of traditional painting media using mechanical and electronic processes as intermediary “drawing” tools in arriving at the painted image. Painting allows my imagination, intuition and accident to intervene in the crafting of an image, which is thereby an act of pleasure and magic, bringing into existence what it is I want to see – to fill an absence in the world. I paint because it gives me license to stare, to be able to flesh out an idea, emotion, or commit to an image a shadow of the world around me. I paint as a political act: to express my power over power larger than myself and often in conversation with other images, words and music.
Thematically, my body of work has moved from a navel-gazing self-obsession about identity to dwell on issues of death and decay, the colonial encounter, the process of Othering, gender and masculinity, man and nature, urban space, class, and war, among others. Through my images, I seek to tell stories and ask questions about the body and its idealization, the perception and representation of light, the coherence of structure, the psychology of colour, the relationship between text and image, and the limits of the frame.

Objective

To observe and interpret the present and the past in order to make a meaningful contribution to the future.