Groups of young people gather in social rituals in Rahman’s cartoon paintings. Boys drink beers at a backyard barbecue. Others smoke cigarettes by a bonfire. The girls, elsewhere, eat dinner. Their overconfident adventures with fireworks make the quintessence of childhood.
The settings of their get-togethers, however, are only the figments of the painter’s imagination. So is their youthful cheer. Rahman finds his friends in deserts and war zones. To offer them reprieve from their horrors, he builds for them a series of stage sets that simulate the comforts of home.
Rahman’s zine hand makes this make-believe explicit but not plausible. Neither do the structures which frame his works in the gallery. His subjects’ stories – the most intriguing takes place in Mostar a decade after the city was besieged in the Bosnian war – are confused by the artist’s overstated, adolescent politics.
