ARTTYCO TALKS
In this conversation, Omar Zafar reflects on painting as a living, cognitive system exploring authorship, hybridity, and the evolving role of art in an age defined by instability, interaction, and transformation.
ARTTYCO TALKS |
EPISODE #24: OMAR ZAFAR
Your practice treats painting as a cognitive system rather than a static image. How did this shift in perception take shape for you, and what does it mean for the way you approach authorship in your work?
O: My conception of painting as a cognitive system emerged from the cultural and historical conditions that shaped me. Formed between eastern epistemologies and an international education, and coming of age within the accelerating contradictions of globalization, pluralism, and post-colonial hybridity,
I recognized early that a static, resolved image could no longer register the instability of my time. Painting required an elastic grammar, one capable of thinking, adapting, and responding to context. This shift was intensified by the interactive ethos of the late 1980s and 1990s, where digital interfaces, gaming environments, and science-fiction imaginaries rendered the traditional picture plane insufficient.
The three trajectories of my practice evolved as distinct yet interrelated modalities of this cognitive orientation. The Interactive Paintings transform the pictorial field into a dynamic system of perpetual recomposition: magnetic, painted fragments migrate across steel or mesh supports, internalizing the distributed agency and algorithmic flux of contemporary life.
The Colorless Paintings respond to the historical saturation of twentieth-century abstraction by removing chroma and engaging transparency, light, and apparition; they operate as perceptual thresholds that appear and withdraw, destabilizing the fixity of form.
The Surfaceless Paintings extend this inquiry into material cognition: suspended paint functions as an autonomous entity shaped by gravity, air, and temporal drift, allowing the work to evolve independently of the surface.
Across these trajectories, authorship undergoes a fundamental reconfiguration. Rather than asserting singular control, I initiate conditions under which painting can reorganize itself, whether through viewer interaction, perceptual co-production, or the behavior of materials.
Authorship becomes dispersed, porous, and contingent a shared space in which painting continues to think beyond the limits of my hand.
2. Your “Interactive Paintings,” “Colorless Paintings,” and “Surfaceless Paintings” each dismantle traditional expectations of the medium. What questions or tensions drive these three trajectories, and how do they speak to the instability of the contemporary world?
O: The three trajectories in my practice emerged organically from lived experience rather than predetermined theory, shaped by a need to remain present within contemporary conditions while pursuing personal growth, artistic truth, and innovation. Each body of work isolates a distinct tension within this landscape.
The Interactive Paintings interrogate authorship in an era of distributed agency, where composition dissolves into a field of collective intervention. Their open, reconfigurable logic mirrors the contradictions of democracy and the volatility of social identity, positioning painting as a cognitive system rather than a fixed artifact.
The Colorless Paintings address the instability of visibility by withdrawing chroma and working with transparency, pushing abstraction toward spectral gesture and near-invisibility. In doing so, they confront not only the unreliability of perception in a post-clarity world but also the broader cultural charge of “color” as a racialized and contested category.
The Surfaceless Paintings destabilize the ontological ground of the medium by suspending dried paint without a support, allowing gravity, fragility, and spatial dissonance to become structural forces that echo collapsing political, ecological, and social foundations.
Across these trajectories, a shared inquiry emerges: how might painting think, act, and endure when every element—surface, chroma, authorship, and form is subjected to flux. These tensions function not as crises but as generative conditions, enabling painting to operate as a responsive, living apparatus attuned to the contradictions of contemporary life.
3. Having lived in Bangladesh, India, the U.S., and Greece, your work is marked by cultural hybridity and philosophical depth. How does your multicultural background influence the conceptual frameworks within your painting systems?
O: My multicultural formation operates as a conceptual engine rather than a biographical detail. Having grown up in Bangladesh and India and later adopted Greek nationality—situated between cultures marked by profound civilizational depth and the epistemic fractures of colonial modernity—I became aware that artistic knowledge was predominantly mediated through Western paradigms.
Figures such as Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate, affirmed that intellectual and aesthetic contribution from the East could recalibrate global discourse, grounding my desire to enter the history of painting not as an imitator, but as an Eastern thinker proposing alternative grammar for the medium.
This ambition cohered in New York in the late 1990s, where multicultural density, intellectual urgency, and a culture of artistic risk allowed my disparate influences to converge. The city’s ethos of experimentation reinforced my commitment to dismantling convention and approaching painting as a field of inquiry rather than repetition.
This pluralistic logic structures the three systems of my practice. The Interactive Paintings channel the chromatic dynamism and ludic sensibilities of South Asian culture while their participatory logic resonates with democratic ideas embedded in Greek intellectual history.
The Colorless Paintings operate as their conceptual counterpoint: suspending chroma to resist inherited racialized and cultural codifications of color and advancing a post-identitarian pictorial language through gesture, light, and transparency. The Surfaceless Paintings articulate the condition of multicultural subjectivity itself; their suspended, groundless brushstrokes enact a state of dislocation and possibility, navigating multiple cultural systems without full assimilation.
Across these trajectories, hybridity emerges as a structural principle rather than a theme. Eastern philosophical sensibilities, Western art-historical legacies, New York experimentalism, and contemporary global conditions converge into a research-driven inquiry into how painting might continue to evolve as a
cognitive and conceptual system in the present.
4. You describe your methodology as heuristic and almost scientific in nature. What does experimentation look like in your studio, and how do discovery and uncertainty shape the
evolution of a piece?
O: My methodology is fundamentally heuristic, structured as an open system in which research, material inquiry, and conceptual speculation operate in continuous exchange. A significant part of the practice is grounded in sustained study of art history, theory, and global developments across culture, technology, geopolitics, and media.
This intellectual scaffolding forms the context against which each of my painting systems—interactive, colorless, and surfaceless—must justify itself as painting, even when it departs from the medium’s inherited grammar.
Experimentation in the studio emerges through tactile, unruly engagement with materials. I work across multiple paint types, industrial finishes, transparent polymers, hardware-store components, found objects,
and unorthodox surfaces, testing how they behave, resist, or unexpectedly align. Failure is expected, because the trajectories I pursue are built from scratch, without established precedents to follow. Uncertainty is a structural condition; every idea must be discovered internally rather than derived from existing models.
Dialogue plays a crucial role in this process. Studio visits, conversations with peers, and critical feedback fold into the work’s evolution, often revealing conceptual or material possibilities that remain invisible from within the solitude of making.
These exchanges act as another layer of experimentation, helping me gauge how the work converses with a broader contemporary sensibility.
Experimentation also extends to presentation. Installation, suspension, spatial occupation, and viewer interaction are no longer auxiliary concerns but integral parts of the work’s conceptual architecture. Discovery enters when materials behave in ways I did not anticipate, generating deviations that redirect the work toward unforeseen trajectories. My task is to recognize when such deviations are meaningful and to follow them with clarity rather than impose control.
Working slightly off-axis from dominant narratives of contemporary painting makes the experimentation more demanding, yet that distance is productive. It creates the conditions for a practice sustained by negotiation between research and intuition, conversation and solitude, material behavior and conceptual rigor, intention and emergence.
5. In your recent work, painting behaves like information fragmented, decentralized, and constantly reorganizing itself. What kind of encounter do you hope the viewer has when engaging with a painting that refuses fixed form or stable meaning?
O: I seek to create a viewer encounter defined by perceptual reorientation. A painting that refuses fixed form does not offer an image to decode; it presents an active system that requires participatory seeing. Whether through movable fragments, suspended surfaces, or colorless apparitions, the work behaves like information in motion: fragmented, decentralized, and continually reorganizing itself. The viewer’s choices enter the logic of the piece, turning perception into a form of authorship.
This instability is intentional. It encourages experimentation rather than certainty, prompting viewers to test possibilities and sense how each gesture reverberates through the work. These evolving configurations often generate spontaneous conversations, forming temporary communities around shared engagement.
The painting becomes a model for how meaning is negotiated in a fractured world.
This dynamic reflects my own multicultural formation, where identities, histories, and cultural logics never aligned into a stable whole. The works translate that experience into visual form, inviting viewers to approach the world from alternate angles, to hold contradictions without demanding resolution, and to recognize that instability can be productive.
If the encounter succeeds, the painting becomes more than an artwork. It becomes a space that mirrors the
viewer’s internal complexity, a site where perception, feeling, and thought reorganize themselves without the need for fixed meaning.
