Samir Salim | Soft Ruins
4 September - 3 October
Samir Salim's paintings are built through acts of concealment as much as revelation. Canvas is folded, gathered, compressed and cut; colour disappears beneath layers of material only to re-emerge in fragments. Rather than treating the painted surface as a stable site of display, Salim subjects it to pressure. What results is not the destruction of the image, but its continual displacement - buried within the work, carried across its folds, or exposed through rupture.
These paintings inhabit an unstable space between collapse and reconstruction. Surfaces gather, wrinkle and fold back into themselves, while fragments of colour and image persist beneath accumulated layers. What appears deconstructed or displaced is never entirely lost. Instead, traces remain: caught in creases, embedded within fabric or exposed at moments of rupture. The works resist the premise of the finished image, allowing concealment, destruction and transformation to become simultaneous conditions of painting.
Central to this process is Salim’s notion of destretching. The tautness conventionally associated with the painted canvas is released, allowing the material to accumulate its own irregularities. Folds become planes, tears become seams, and the distinction between image and support begins to collapse. The canvas ceases to function as a passive ground and instead becomes an active participant in the construction of the work. Looking consequently becomes a process of negotiation, moving between what is revealed and what remains withheld.
This material instability also unsettles the conventions through which an image becomes legible. Paint gathers in creases, thins across raised surfaces and catches the light along ruptures and edges. Pattern, colour and materiality compete and overlap, producing a shifting tension between order and collapse, disclosure and concealment. Salim’s engagement with Roland Barthes extends this inquiry, disrupting the seemingly natural codes through which images acquire meaning. Rather than rejecting the conventions of painting, the works expose their construction by making the canvas itself unstable.
Alongside this interrogation of the painted surface is a sustained engagement with textile culture in South Asia, where fabric operates as a carrier of identity, memory, labour, status and ritual. Clothing can communicate belonging and social position while retaining traces of the body that has worn or inhabited it. In Salim’s paintings, fabric appears in the absence of the body, holding onto presence through weight, folds and contours. His experience of a family negotiating between traditional Bengali clothing and Western modes of dress informs a broader understanding of material as something whose meaning shifts through use, context and presentation. Patterns including harlequins and fractured geometries operate as visual codes, while seams, tears and folds register physical action and the passage of time. Fabric becomes both subject and method: a medium through which histories can be concealed, carried and transformed.
Soft Ruins ultimately proposes painting as a state of continual becoming. Its surfaces offer fragments rather than conclusions, inviting the viewer to move between layers, traces and interruptions. Here, collapse does not signify disappearance. What is buried remains active; what is concealed continues to shape the surface; and what appears deconstructed becomes another condition through which the painting can emerge.
SELECTED WORKS
INSTALLATION VIEWS
Samir Salim (b. 1995, Manchester) lives and works in Manchester. He received an MA in Painting from the Manchester School of Art (2024) and the Royal College of Art, London (2025), following an earlier career in law in the UK and Germany.
Salim’s painting practice explores the physical manipulation of the canvas, treating the surface as a site of rupture, reconstruction and reconstitution. Through folding, compression and other forms of material intervention, he challenges the conventional relationship between surface and subsurface, opening up new ways of thinking about materiality, structure and presence.
Recent exhibitions include Multiple Times, Indigo+Madder, London (2026); States of Becoming, Kers Gallery, Amsterdam (2025) and Manchester Open, HOME, Manchester; 2024.
To request a catalogue or receive further information, please get in touch: info@indigoplusmadder.com
Starfish, 2026
Oil, collage and oil stick on canvas
30 x 30 cm