Amaan Jahangir: The Brutal Romance of Feeling

A UK-based figurative painter and mixed-media artist, Jahangir draws from a wide range of disciplines—painting, digital performance, poetry—and blends them into an emotionally charged visual lexicon. Born of a bicultural upbringing and formally trained at Reading University, he brings sensitivity to both the visual and the conceptual, the sacred and the mundane. His process is deeply intuitive, yet never directionless. It is, in its essence, the art of knowing how much to reveal—and when.

At first glance, his work calls to mind the visceral physicality of Francis Bacon, with its contorted limbs and psychological rawness. But Jahangir tempers that violence with a tenderness that recalls the work of Tracey Emin or Käthe Kollwitz. His figures suffer, yes—but they do so while wrapped in the language of love, longing, and digital vulnerability. This is the new gothic. This is martyrdom via Messenger.

In yes (2025), a figure lies splayed across the canvas, bleeding from the chest, a white shirt soaked in red. The textures are thick, impastoed, almost sculptural. The body appears lifeless—yet a blue bubble above says simply, “yes,” in response to the question, “have you been okay?” The dissonance between the image and the text is haunting. Here, Jahangir channels Caravaggio’s The Entombment of Christ but recontextualizes the sacred body into the terrain of modern silence—the kind of silence born from emotional repression and social expectations.

There is a familiarity to the scene: the white T-shirt, the jeans, the phone message. This is not mythological distance—it’s your friend, your partner, your own reflection at 2AM. This is the collapse that happens in private, while the public performance remains smooth. In Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, he writes, “I am the one who waits.” Jahangir’s painting, however, suggests what happens after the waiting ends. The subject has stopped pretending. The act of “being okay” becomes fatal.

Jahangir’s gift lies in his ability to expand a single moment—whether a memory or a text thread—into something universal. In the chaos of the universe (2025), a figure spirals mid-air, seemingly consumed by a galactic storm of color. The lines blur between the physical and the metaphysical. There is an echo of Edvard Munch in the vibrant, swirling strokes, as if sound and feeling are colliding on canvas. Color becomes emotion, and space becomes psychological.

This work is not about falling, exactly—it is about surrender. The message “you are everything” floats above, and we don’t know whether it’s being received or imagined. The ambiguity is crucial. Jahangir invites us to read ourselves into the space between the text and the fall. Is this a moment of grace, or of total dissolution?

There’s something almost cosmic about Jahangir’s color logic here. His palette suggests that chaos is not necessarily dark. It can be luminous, saturated, blinding. The figure in the chaos of the universe is rendered not as victim or hero, but as someone unmoored—weightless within both love and oblivion. This is where Jahangir’s work most clearly dialogues with the Symbolist tradition, particularly the metaphysical states painted by Odilon Redon or Gustav Klimt. However, instead of dreams and angels, Jahangir gives us fractured messages and emotional detritus. His universe is not golden—it is glitchy, bright, and heartbreaking.

Nowhere is the emotional rupture more distilled than in The Death of Cupid (2023), a work that seems to fuse myth, poetry, and performance into a single image. A winged figure, likely Cupid, lies shot through the back with an arrow. The golden field around him is soft, pastoral, yet stained. The air is filled with light, but the ground bleeds. The poem that accompanies the work—“One moment, let it last a lifetime. / Oh I cried, / Oh I cried, / How that angel died.”—functions not only as narration, but as spell, as dirge, as eulogy.

Here, Jahangir is engaging myth not as a fixed symbol but as an emotional tool. By killing Cupid, he doesn’t erase love—he humanizes it. In classical iconography, Cupid is mischievous, impulsive, divine. In Jahangir’s world, he is fragile, mortal, and subject to grief. The gods are not above us—they are inside us. They break the same way we do.

This inversion of myth recalls the modernist strategies of deconstruction. Much like how Picasso rendered the Minotaur as tragic rather than monstrous, or how Louise Bourgeois cast the maternal as monstrous and sacred simultaneously, Jahangir challenges the conventional symbolic order. In doing so, he opens new space for viewers to project their own emotional narratives into the work.

It is no coincidence that his works are so deeply rooted in communication—messages, miscommunications, silences. This is where his painterly practice intersects with contemporary theory. Hélène Cixous’ notion of écriture féminine, or the writing of the body through emotional and intuitive expression, is particularly resonant. Jahangir’s work bypasses the rational and dives into the sensory. The paint does not explain; it feels. His figures are not explained; they are exposed.

This also brings to mind theorist Sara Ahmed’s writing on affect and emotion as cultural practices. In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed argues that feelings do not simply reside in the body but move between bodies. Jahangir’s art exemplifies this movement. His canvases become conduits, where the viewer does not merely observe but absorbs. We feel implicated in the grief, in the longing, in the denial.

Perhaps this is what makes his work so affecting—it is both deeply personal and completely collective. We see ourselves in the wound. We see ourselves in the silence.

Amaan Jahangir is not interested in resolution. His figures do not heal; they persist. They endure. They ache beautifully. Instead of closure, he offers us confrontation—a space where we must witness the full contradiction of being alive in the age of curated selves and disappearing messages.

And yet, there is no cynicism in his work. Even at its most painful, his art is filled with care. Every brushstroke feels tender, even when depicting rupture. It is this careful handling of vulnerability that sets him apart. His paintings don’t just represent feeling—they honor it.

Jahangir’s world is one where love hurts, where memory lingers, and where even silence speaks volumes. He gives us the brutal romance of feeling—and dares us to feel it fully.