It’s unsettling for a critic when an artist who made his name pursuing mostly bad ideas does something different and altogether better. Is the departure a fluke, a new direction, or does it recast the earlier practice, thus demanding a reappraisal of earlier disappointments?
Sahib is known for his fetishist indulgence in identity. If this new work stems from the same interests, it is only opaquely. In the gallery’s darkened spaces, a deformed shadow of a stray dog traverses the otherwise empty floor. The animal moves erratically, its limbs distorted by the vantage of the overhead camera, reminiscent of the technical imagery of police helicopter chases.
This spectral appearance, set to a low hum soundtrack, is eerie, as if the canine’s sorry end was already a foregone conclusion. One can’t help but wish for it, too: animal pity turns into animal cruelty, and bang, the mutt’s a goner. Is this the catastrophic link to Sahib’s earlier gay and British-Asian preoccupations?
In this atmosphere, his Horizon paintings — postcard-sized acrylic tableaux fashioned after LED video displays — are an intriguing but unnecessary reprieve in a predictable aesthetic. His terrible poems, on the other hand, make one wish Sahib had stuck to works about leather bars and poppers.
