Mirage Landscapes: Paintings by Fareen Butt

Crossing Art is pleased to announce the opening of Mirage Landscapes: Paintings by Fareen Butt. The Mirage Series is a collection of metaphysical landscapes inspired by the spiritual and mystical concepts of Jerrahi and Ishraqi Sufism, as well as Buddhism. The works explore the perceptions of truth and enlightenment unique to each human being. The rich textures that engulf the artist’s large canvases are created through a unique process of combining the Japanese painting technique of Nihonga with Pointillism.

Fareen Butt fuses eastern and western methodologies that are reflected in her painting process where she combines Southeast Asian methods and classical European fine art. The two methods used in the Mirage Series are Nihonga, which includes the process of using precious and semi-precious stones as pigment, and Pointillism, a method made famous by Seurat in the 1800s and more recently by Pousette-Dart. Butt harmoniously merges Nihonga with Pointillism to create the complex colors and textures of her works. Her hybrid technique also lends itself to that of the meditative through the time and discipline it takes to cover the vast amounts of surface in such a feverous but controlled style.

The Mirage Bamboo Series is based on photographs taken of serene forest landscapes in China and the Himalayas. The inspiration of the natural is translated onto the canvas with stones such as ruby, diamond and sapphire, derived from the artist’s native region of the Himalayas. It is the birthplace of the Buddha, the place where he meditated over mysteries, and sought enlightenment. The paintings produce a meditative effect on the viewer as he or she steps from the painting to watch the disconnected “points” of color merge to form vibrant landscapes. Butt perceives the landscapes to be visions of “places rendered sacred by many: the earthly manifestation of the pervasive cosmological landscape; the earthly manifestation of the Universal consciousness in the form of the Human collective consciousness.” Expressed through these “moving” points of color amidst the solid, stagnant sections of stone, she explains that the works “pursue the vital energy embodied, ebbing, in these spaces amidst the roots of omnipresence. It is a representation of the landscape as a fertile spiritual Mecca, in its entirety.”

Fareen Butt is a Pakistani painter who lives and works in New York. She received her BA from The New School in New York and is a PhD candidate for University of London, Goldsmith College. Butt has future exhibitions planned for Canada, Beirut, Qatar, Oman, Paris, Berlin, New York, Dubai, Dhaka and India.

The exhibition Mirage Landscapes visually presents a dialogue between humanity’s historical desire for a concise cosmogony and the perpetual pursuit of enlightenment.