Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger; of having gone through an experience all the way to the end to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and as nearly as possible definitive utterance of this singularity.
Letters on Cezanne – Rainer Maria Rilke

Tariq Usman Luni’s work is a process. He works the wood hard and effectively and out come workings of grandeur and dynamic expression. Although his pieces seem concerned with great mass and bulk, there are indentations, cavities, interiors and beginnings. This is obtained by the artist’s constantly adding and subtracting, moving chunks of wood from one place to another, always leaving evidence of creation like mole tunnels or a snail’s trail. His pieces may be filed up to five times before they are considered ‘arrived at’ – but you are left with the certainty they are en route. He is a young sculptor so involved in his construction and deconstruction process that his work goes through a ‘history’ of its own. His free-standing sculptural pieces are brave works in the direct way they speak of mortality. Luni reveals our inner structure from under our skin, and wood is a suitable medium to choose for making such a memento mori.
Meaning is a by-product of articulation. It is what one arrives at and recognizes, at best a relative and temporary solution. This has to do with the elusive, nomadic essence of meaning. Working in the dark with change and chance as partners, one is lucky to catch a glimpse of it as the nightly caravan speeds by. For his part, the artist is content in the aftermath if he can retrieve some aleatory marks. Luni works mostly from themes as starting points, mere parameters against free fall. Being a sculptor is like jumping off a plane and making a parachute on the way down.
Luni is interested in that place in our psyche where nature and culture have to sit down and deal with one another. Engaged in his work, he feels like he is in the front row watching this odd couple negotiate the more or less comfortable intersections that we have to live with; the crossroads of body and mind, materials and ideas, order and disorder.
Surprise has, of course, always been part of Luni’s modus operandi: his work thrives on unexpected positions and juxtapositions, and on visual plays involving gravity. The sculpture’s singleness of colour and uniformity of material lulls the viewer. Expecting continuity, we are disarmed for the many little punch lines of choice, placement and relationship built into these pieces. Reversals are plentiful, adding strong dynamic tension and compelling fresh attention as might a rude Zen master’s trick. These reversals also somehow transform the identity factor, leaching away the quotation marks that usually adhere to such objects and returning them to some larger ecology of meaning.
Luni is an artist of inside-outness and his pieces cordially invite you to enter into an inward space that undulates in much the same way as a venturi tube. This play with space and form is sensually exciting. He is clearly influenced by his study of physics, so he would be well aware of the formation of a black hole which sucks in energy, compresses and stretches into itself the altered surface outside and inside. Each work of Luni’s emphasizes the dual nature of the human body in art – materially realised yet spiritually expressive – with a striking juxtaposition of elements that seem crudely archaic and classically refined. Some of the more archaic looking details are almost geological in character, recalling the baroque mineral deposits that are the residues of geothermal activity, while others appear as if they had been extracted from the architectural rubble of an ancient civilisation. Contrasting with these rough elements, the principal component of each wood is an elongated body, with delicately modelled surfaces and much polished detail; they are almost always female or androgynous, their faces smoothed into placid, featureless ovals that exude serenity.
Relating to media such as wood and drawing which are suitable for multiple changes and allow for a direct approach, Luni tends to give up on plans and goals as they tend to interfere with the many possibilities generated as the work evolves. In its raw state, wood is a boneless, unstructured material, a proper metaphor for chaos and nature. A piece in progress is a likely place for a crisis to occur. It has the fertility of chaos. There, an unpredictable situation may build up that has to be dealt with. In the end what you get to see is the measure of resolution brought to the crisis. The outcome is the piece itself.
It appears that Luni made a close study of biomorphic structures of insects, plants and seeds before he began to explore the forms of blossoming organisms in sculpture. His work emphasises the gravitational substance of form and live rhythms of nature. These hollow shells contain in them a space tightly convex. The viewer is induced to move around, even stoop over the voluminous organisms, which despite the calculatedly subdued texture, arouse a magnetic sensation of touch. Luni’s intention to feel into these objects made him concentrate on the genetic forms of growth. The dynamics of growth led to the latent sexual energy he found in the vital sap gushing up the plant and pushing the bud out of the splitting seed. The erotic orifice now showed on massive bulges undulating in gravitational surges and ebbs. Perhaps Luni’s endeavour was to arrest the process of transformation midway between growth and fruition, to concretise the fluid cellular movements of forming and reforming into structures of continual growth. Like Paul Klee said: “Art does not represent or analyse the world, but makes it apparent.”