Sacha Jafri
Sacha Jafri (B 1977, Britain)Brit painter Sacha Jafri has gained
international acclaim since his graduate show only 6 years ago. His work
features in major private collections throughout the world, not to mention
his celebrity following and has raised over £1.5 million for charity by
auctioning selected works. Jafri has always defined himself as a "magical
realist" - a phrase that, in the visual register, evokes the work of a
slightly older contemporary, Peter Doig, and historically, the tradition of
surrealism. Whilst Doig remains an influence, Jafri's work has nothing to do
with modernism's literalising of the unconscious. Far more important, I'd
suggest, are literary sources: Marquez, Rushdie, perhaps Angela Carter and
Alejo Carpentier. In each of these writers the mundane stuff of everyday
life is suddenly illuminated and made "magical" by the intrusion of an event
that is itself quotidian, but which, in the context of the quotidian seems
wholly extraordinary to the narrator. (Perhaps the apogee of such moments is
the "discovery" of ice in Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.) Looking
at Jafri's paintings of the Thames - Westminster and this city dweller,
jaded by experience, once again sees urban life as enchanted, as if seeing
it for the first time through the eyes of a child or a young love.
