A Review of Yousha Bashir's Exhibition at Parallel Circuit 

Original text in Farsi by Abel Hartouni

Translated to English by Omid Armat

"The Infinite Continuum" is the title of an installation of Yousha Bashir's recent paintings, exhibited at Parallel Circuit from October 8 to November 12, 2021. Yousha Bashir, born in 1989 in Manila, Philippines, has a BA in Computer Graphics and has graduated with a Master's degree from Farhangian University. He has previously experimented with sculpture, but currently, most of his works are paintings in which there is always a sign of landscape. Digital landscapes with great meticulous details, various surfaces with hard distinguishing edges, gradients of saturated colors, and a strong tendency to create a virtual sense of depth are among the most important features of his works that stick in the viewer's mind. "The Infinite Continuum"  consists of three related and ongoing series of his works with the titles "The Breakdown of Confined Space", "Dividing The Divided" and "The Second Space/The Third Space". Generally, in all three series, he is mainly engaged in translating the digital image into a physical one, the viewer's understanding of the painting, and finally, the painted spatiality.  

Bashir believes the basic idea of these works to have been derived from the photographs he captured with his cellphone while painting. Looking at his paintings on the screen of his cellphone, he noticed that his paintings turn into similar images but with some of their qualities lost. This brought the question of 'what is the best space to display a painting?' to the artist's mind, which has also been his basic idea in the process of creating artworks displayed in this show. The question may have also led the artist to create images in a digital context; a non-existent, but unlimited space. He creates his sketches only in digital format and his main working process is to translate the digital sketch into an analog image. This translation, done by projecting the digital sketch on the canvas, causes elements of the digital context – the pixels – to always be present in Bashir's paintings. Even when he paints for its own sake, he uses technological tools, such as projectors, laser-cut stencils, and airbrushes.  

His main subjects are mostly landscapes with structures similar to collages. For him, collage mediates in establishing some sort of relation between the space and the content; a relation which is visible throughout the whole series. In fact, here the space is being analyzed; the non-existent digital space, the space which is being represented in the painting, or the three-dimensional space which the painting itself is a part of it. In "The Breakdown of Confined Space" we engage with the breakdown of space within the painting frame. Here comes the question of where is the frame, and how far we can go in dividing it into other frames? It is like waking up in a dream or wandering around the web, in which we keep entering pages within other pages, where each frame has a unique composition and is surrounded by another frame or tries to break its limits. When the painting is finished, the artist engages himself with another challenge: how is it possible for the painted object to be extended beyond its frame? 

In "Dividing The Divided", the pre-divided frame of the painting fancifully exceeds the frame and invades the space. Just like in one sequence of "The Ring" directed by Hideo Nakata in which the wandering ghost of a woman slowly moves from the farthest point of the picture, reaches the television's screen, gets out of the television and enters the room's space, the painted objects in this series tend to extend to their surrounding space (of course, within the limits of the painting's frame). Sometimes the frame's limits are discernable, but sometimes there is only a memory left of it.  

The next step is to visualize the relation between the painting and its surrounding space, by focusing on the presence of a viewer standing in front of it; this is done in "The Second Space/The Third Space". The series consists of two diptychs installed on the wall at the end of the gallery's space. In the first panel of each painting, a digital landscape is represented – which is a translation of the artist's engagement with nature – and in the second panel, a space similar to the gallery is represented, in which the painting is depicted again with a figure looking at it. These paintings can be considered as the visualization of the exhibition space which the artist has imagined in his mind. Here, in addition to spatiality and playing with the space, the artist has also addressed time, as if he pictures a phantom appearance of the future.  

It seems that in each stage, Bashir's paintings tend to move back to their basic idea despite their progressive process. It is not clear whether we are moving forward or back, and maybe choosing "The Infinite Continuum" as the show's name is actually addressing this point. His works are, in fact, materializing mental ideas, in which a kind of ambiguity and emptiness is visible; it seems that the artist is trying to make the viewer engage with a situation in between. In his works, there is a desire for constant progress, and at the same time, a refusal to finish working on an idea (despite his strong obsessive desire for finishing a painting); this confronts the viewer with the question of how this continuum is going to continue?