What i SAY AND WHAT I MEAN

What we say and what we mean are, more often than not, two separate things. The distance between them is not always large, but it is always there. We dress our thoughts and desires in language which conceals and distorts, shaped by awareness of others and of ourselves, by the need not to disturb and the equally urgent need to perform as the person we are perceived to be. Perhaps we mask what we mean because of shame. Perhaps because of fear. Perhaps because the truth itself is not a solid thing but a liquid one, pooling somewhere beneath consciousness, and we cannot say what we mean because we do not know what we mean.

For her solo show, What I Say and What I Mean, Marium M. Habib troubles exactly this space. The space between the surface and the secret, between what is shown and what is buried. On the surface, these paintings are populated by Marium’s iconic cast of dancing bonobos, bunches of bananas and exotic plant life. But these new works have layers. Literal layers. Peer beneath the surface and you see fleeting moments of intimacy, characters and animals disguised by bold washes of indigo blue. The conceptual layers which separate what we say from what we mean are actualised in individual layers of paint.

On a ground of gesso, Marium begins by painting her secrets. Things which are true. She then entirely covers the canvas in a wash of indigo. This act of concealment allows the underpaintings to be, according to Marium, the most honest, free and raw to date. Then she scrubs. Physically removing pigment from the surface, she begins to reveal elements of the work, and what she reveals is partial, controlled, a careful negotiation between confession and concealment. Here is a scene of desire. Here is a body close to another body. Here is something you recognise but cannot name. She invites you to look. She does not invite you to see everything. We are left in the dark about what Marium’s secrets really are. These are not anecdotes but gestures to the desires we all have, the ones we think we shouldn’t mention. Marium paints them and then paints over them and then paints over them again, turpentine-soaked washes dripping down the canvas in thin, delicate rivulets. Each layer takes us further from where we began. Each layer is more vivid, more dramatic, more absurd. The truth gets buried deeper and the surface gets more beautiful.

Though the secrets themselves are concealed, there are recurrent preoccupations in Marium’s work: desire, what it is to have a female body under a patriarchy, the exoticising and orientalising of East by West, the power structures that deem who gets to look at whom. Following the notion that the personal is political, Marium’s work is intensely personal and yet inseparable from the structures that shape her experience of the world. She is always aware of them. One may think it mildly absurd for work so personal to be so full of apes and exotic flora. But Marium paints with animals and plants the way fabulists write with them, because, as Paula Rego said, “when you turn them into animals, they can do anything.”

Over the last few years the symbols and creatures which populate Marium’s work have become a language of their own. Her monkeys are the Freudian id, unshackled. They are human desires unchecked by social and moral constraints. Monkey-tentacle-head, the monkey-octopus hybrid, represents the ultimate freedom of the inner wild thing. It is notable that in this series, Let Your Freak Flag Fly is the only painting in which the layers do not exist. Instead, monkey-tentacle-head appears triumphant and unmasked from its indigo ground. No concealment, no scrubbing, just the wild-thing unleashed and undisguised. The flowers are bright and insistent and everywhere. They are yonic, symbols of love, and yet also, Marium says, a satirical jab at exoticism. The bananas are phallic, of course. Everything in Marium’s world is doing double duty, saying one thing and meaning another, just like we do.

For all this conceptual density, for all the layered architecture of symbol andsurface, Marium’s paintings are funny. The humour is calculated to disarm. You laugh, and in the moment of laughing your guard drops, and the work moves in close. Marium has said, of her monkeys, that they will dance for you. And they do. The performance is generous, energetic, entertaining. She offers us laughter in the same spirit that she offers us bright colour and lively composition: as a way in, but also as a way of maintaining control over how much of herself is exposed. The vulnerability is real. The management of that vulnerability is equally real. She uses laughter the way she uses indigo. To cover, to reveal, to control how much of the truth gets through.

It would be possible to look at these paintings and see only their considerable visual pleasure, the richness of colour, the confidence of mark-making, the playful approach to materiality. They are paintings that reward looking. But the longer you stand with them, the more you become aware of what is underneath. Not the literal underpainting, though that is there, but the structure of concealment and revelation that governs every element of the work. What we say and what we mean are, more often than not, two separate things. In this new body of work, Marium shows us once more that she is not only a formidable painter but a piercingly observant reader of the worlds we perform in and the worlds we build between each other. She paints what we hide. She hides what she paints. And in the space between, something true becomes visible. Not whole, not entirely legible, but unmistakably present.