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Designer insight: Sacha Jafri
This month, one of Britain's most exciting young artists Sacha Jafri unveils his ten-year retrospective in Dubai. We spoke to him on the eve of the opening.
Sacha Jafri is bursting with enthusiasm when we meet him in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt. It's no surprise he's excited. At the age of just thirty Jafri is the youngest living artist ever to have a ten-year retrospective.
In a mammoth operation, which has involved gathering works from both major public and private collections worldwide, Jafri's groundbreaking body of work, spanning from 1997 to 2007 is ready to be unveiled for the first time in Dubai, before embarking on a massive two year worldwide tour.
"It's completely surreal," marvels Jafri, "when I saw the word retrospective, I thought ‘oh my god that's mad, that's like Picasso aged sixty!'" But despite his young age, Jafri has been marked out by critics as one of Britain's most exciting contemporary artists, who is revolutionising painting and, in an era dominated by conceptual art, placing it back at the centre of the world art scene.
According to Jafri, a painting should "work like an electrical shock on your senses and emotions, get you really hyper excited about your surroundings, and bring it all alive again. Some paintings every now and then can do it, and that's inspiring." Jafri's work undoubtedly seems to possess that special quality. Famed for his ‘magical realist' style, his vibrant, energetic pieces appear to pulse with life.
"Each of my paintings is actually about ten or twelve paintings on top of each other so they are multi, multi layered," he explains. "You just keep building and building with layers and layers and layers of ideas and narrative and colours and marks and by the end you have got something organic that moves with you."
Jafri's inspiration is taken from literature, specifically magical realist writers such as Garcia Marquez, Franz Kafka, Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry. He paints from his own sub conscience to create a world that we know and recognise, but with a magical twist.
"It's about linking your lucid reality, your everyday consciousness, to your sub conscience, the world you normally experience when you're asleep - your dream world."
Jafri developed his talent at a young age (one of his first pieces which he did aged just 15 will form part of the retrospective "it's actually a really cool piece it's quite Hockney!"). He says it is his ability never to lose touch with his childhood self that has helped inspire and enrich his work.
"I've always learnt from children my whole life. Their thoughts, their minds, the way they interact is so unmanipulated by the world that it's refreshing," he says. "We as human beings are too affected by our surroundings to the point where we lose that sense of self. I did a painting called ‘Only as a Child' which I guess is my motto in life - remember the child within you and really remember it, and it will stay with you forever."
However Jafri's youthful outlook should not belie his fierce ambition and passion for his work. With sell out collections all over the world, and paintings selling for between 397,000 AED and 1.4 million AED, he is fast becoming one of the biggest names in the contemporary art world, but for Jafri, whose sights are set on a much higher goal, this is clearly just the beginning.
"My only ambition is to become an important artist of this century - one that is remembered in 200 years," he says matter of factly. "The artists that we know now - Picasso, Gorky, Kandinsky, Keefe, Pollock - all these guys were incredibly ambitious, they weren't just in their studio going, ‘oh that's quite nice', they were all thinking ‘I want to achieve something', and it's no coincidence that they did. And that's my ambition - To become not just someone who paints pretty paintings and sells them but someone who is a Picasso, a Kandinsky, a Van Gogh. And anything less than that is just not good enough."
10-Year Retrospective of Sacha Jafri (1997 -2007), Grand Hyatt Al Ameera Ballroom, 18th Feb- 4th March
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