Raafar Ishak's practice is informed by his studies in architecture, his Arabic cultural heritage and a beautifully muted graphic style. While at first glace his semi-figurative paintings appear gorgeously decorative, they encompass a series of broader speculations about the nature of government, statehood, national borders and identity, as well as ideas of home, belonging and citizenship.
Ishak's And government works are drawn from a series of 39 paintings that were included in the artist's first solo show at 200 Gertrude Street in 1995. As elsewhere in his oeuvre, in these works Ishak combines and deconstructs elements from the expansive, and at times contradictory, archive of imagery he has gathered over time. Ishak seamlessly mixes the personal with the political, the actual and the imagined, in a way that highlights the circularity and interdependency of these relationships. Underscored by a utopian, even romantic, tendency, his work is subtle, contemplative and alive to the nuances of cross-cultural dialogue and transit.
