Aicon focuses on the artistry of paper through ‘Delicately Does It’

Delicately Does It by Aicon is a group exhibition that focused on the works of several artists who have spent their careers mastering their craft in impossibly complicated and intricate ways, primarily on and with paper. Paper could be both a surface and a medium for these artists, fragile yet impervious. Through precise actions such as cutting, folding, etching and dyeing, the artists manipulated the materiality of paper and demonstrated its various properties while allowing their labour-intensive language to develop.

Often meditatively repetitive and meticulous, these works thrummed with ritualism and geometry at the show which ran from May 23 - June 29, 2024. Delicately Does It was about the spontaneous artistic processes and journeys the artists embarked on, without knowing where they might conclude. The more one looked at these works, the more they got pulled into their intimate worlds of wonder and curiosity.

Delicately Does It brought together artists from multiple generations, starting with Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Zarina Hashmi. Farmanfarmaian’s practice included traditional reverse glass painting, mirror mosaics, sculpture art and art installations. For the exhibition, Aicon presented a selection of her kaleidoscopic drawings in combinations of coloured pencil, felt-tip pen, glitter and marker on paper that fused the principles of Islamic geometry with the minimalist shapes of Western abstraction.

Opposite Farmanfarmaian’s vibrant colour palette were the works of Zarina Hashmi. Artworks such as the Refugee Camp (2015) highlighted Hashmi’s use of texture and materiality through collage in a minimalist composition to encapsulate complex themes of displacement, home and memory.

The visual legacy of Farmanfarmaian and Hashmi is readily apparent in the works of emerging artists Safdar Ali Qureshi and Yasi Alipour. Although a skilled miniature painter and teacher of the tradition, Qureshi’s paintings have become increasingly abstract. Using short, repetitive brush strokes and unblended colours, the artist overlaps multiple layers to convey the infinite while simultaneously reflecting the more immediate internal havoc wreaked by devastating floods in his home province.

For Alipour, the Ghulam Mohammad work, Untitled, 2023, and principles of mathematics come together with Islamic geometry to build the foundation of her paper-folding practice. Alipour’s tactile works are created using a variety of paper types and photosensitive dyes, which evoke landscapes, constellations and instruments of meditation (to name but a few), that were on view.

While minimalism and abstraction thematically connected many of the artworks in Delicately Does It, complex surfaces featuring text linked artists Youdhisthir Maharjan, Ghulam Mohammad and IMAGINE at the art gallery in NY. Maharjan recycles books and other found objects to create works that exist independently from their original context. He painstakingly cuts out letters from books, rips and weaves together strands of paper and embraces autopoietic print processes, resulting in objects that are identifiable yet alien.

Mohammad also utilises individually cut letters, specifically Urdu ones, which he then pastes into delicate collages on Wasli paper. The illegibility of letters in Mohammad’s works reflects his experience struggling to acquaint himself with Urdu after growing up in Balochistan, where combinations and pronunciations of basic letters are so different.

Using ink rather than cutouts, IMAGINE’s Home, too series features a single letter from the Nepali alphabet painted four times in an overlapping square. The artist paints the letters without measurements or guidelines, embracing a meditative process impacted by the regulation of her breath to create even and symmetrical images.

Rounding out the art exhibition were the fine line drawings of Waqas Khan and Sathi Guin, recognisable by Khan's repetitive mark-making featuring dashes and dots and his cell-like images drawing the viewer in close, even when on a large scale, to create a phenomenological experience. The organic structures he builds over the expanse of Untitled (2024) on canvas bring to mind something as vast as the cosmos and as intimate as a fingerprint.

A similar organic quality is found in the works of Guin. With no definite start or end point, her ambiguous drawings are reflections of her dreams and emotions. The artist is drawn to watercolour and paper for their inherently vulnerable qualities. Great care must be taken when using these materials to preserve their integrity and avoid immutable errors.

The nine artists featured in Delicately Does It showcased myriad techniques and strategies for creating intricate artworks on and with paper, occasionally bringing in canvas when scale dictated a more structured surface.