Native Hand

Touloub draws on the tradition of Persian miniatures and explains it as his way of subverting the long-held notion that there was no originality in such works, that they all followed a template. “This is what we have learned from the West. We have been told that miniature art was highly specialised and there were separate artists for drawing trees and figures, and then other artists would fill in the colours. So we are told that because each artist’s work involved so much drudgery and repetition, there was no originality and hence, no real artistry,” he says, “But if you examine them closely, you will find that each flower is subtly different from the other.”

For the 29-year-old artist, who trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the very act of drawing by hand and repeating patterns, as was once done by miniaturists in the pre-modern era, is art. This comes through in works such as the untitled piece where a number of faceless, kneeling figures, which are in fact, the same figure, are rendered with ink and gouache in a long, looping series. Raw, an abstract work, in which Touloub has used pigmented ink to minutely make a series of waves, shows the artist’s control and precision and like the other works in the show, merits the viewer’s close attention.