Born in 1986 in the UK, Ilyas Kassam is an Indian Ismaili Visual Artist and Poet. Drawing from Ismaili, Kufic, and Japanese calligraphic traditions, his works centres around the notion of infinity and the role language plays within the mystical experience. Ilyas is known for his large textual paintings on rice paper and canvas, that have an explosive yet meditative quality.
He is the author of Reminiscence of the Present, co-host of Karl Marx Does The Washing Up podcast, and was an exhibitor at the 2018 International Ismaili Islamic Arts Festival. His poetry has been widely published by The Aleph Review, New River Press, Simon and Schuster and has appeared in countless anthologies. His film ‘Ligare’ was screened in 2018 at TSS, Time Square, New York. In 2020 His exhibition ‘The Way’ was held at the institution of Port Art and Design Tsuyama, Japan, as part of a joint show with the infamous icon, Misuzu Kaneko. His painted works have gained recent acclaim due to his novel reimagining of ancient techniques.
Ilyas is a self-taught artist whose education emerged out of an immersive 5-year period of meditation and self-discovery. In 2009 he visited the Kangra valley, India, where he spent months meditating in the cave of Baba Sant Ram. This experience gave birth to a prolific period of creative and philosophical inquiry. Ever since his work has been rooted in the esoteric, and has paid reverence to mystical traditions across the world. He has since studied under shamans, learning the language of plants at Schumacher College, and journeyed to the Guangxi mountains of China, to learn calligraphy with the Langshi Shifu.
His process is autonomic, performative, and works through the natural movements of the body. With roots in Ismaili esoteric thought, he draws inspiration from expressionistic practices including the Bokujinkai and Gutai movements that emerged out of Japan in the 1950s. His practice seeks to create spaces and materials that embody a temple like theurgy, reflecting the inner architecture of his process. When speaking of his process Ilyas states that his work “emanates from a meticulous philosophy but is expressed completely thoughtlessly so as to create a juxtaposition that allows an access to the poetic - the point between the visceral and the cognitive".
His current works consist mostly of mix media on Kozo Rice paper and canvas. These large sculptural paintings hold a very immediate gestural quality to them. In recent years, Ilyas’s attention has focused on the role language plays in relating to the intangible aspects of the world; How can we use language to transcend its own literalism? By interweaving poetry, asemic text and visual imagery together, Ilyas seeks to recalibrate our language, so that it may be returned to its natural poetic state. These tiny, often illegible, poems found within his paintings point to a very precise linguistic meaning that is derived not from its definition but from its essence.