The Judge’s Quarters takes its point of departure from a room inside the eighteenth-century courthouse in Clerkenwell, London, now known as the restaurant “Sessions Arts Club”.  The room’s preserved Regency interior bares the traces of past juridical authority and imperial governance. Once a place where defendants were tried, sentenced, or exiled to the colonies, the building also contained the private chambers where the judge withdrew between trials.  

After installing an earlier series of paintings of abstracted Islamic minarets in this space in 2021, the charged architectural setting prompted Syed to reflect on the symbolic and historical weight embedded within England’s architectures. Situating the series within a lineage of painted restaurants and interiors across art history, notably Kippenberger’s “Paris Bar” (1991), Caulfield’s “Tandoori Restaurant” (1971) and Matisse’s “The Red Studio” (1911), Syed interweaves and collages the architecture of this particular space with the form of the rubber plant, a central motif in his painting over the last several years. The room is depicted broken up, split and divided between panels, hovering between a second-generation copy of an interior and a patterned textile.

Syed develops a particular process described as “reverse archaeology” where material is added in order to uncover. His paintings emerge through a blotting-based process whereby paper is pressed onto wet pigment, drawn through, and lifted to reveal fragmented images. As the paper is removed, underlying layers of blue pigment surface, producing reversed impressions. These transferred surfaces are then cut, reassembled, and recomposed, generating new pictorial structures that extend the image through acts of displacement and reconstruction.  

At the core of Shaan Syed’s practice lies an investigation into the politics of seeing. Working across the intersections of multiple cultural genealogies, between India, Pakistan, Britain, and Canada, Syed engages the phenomenological and psychoanalytic dimensions of painting, exploring how paintings - or ‘signs’ as he calls them - are produced, perceived, and continually reinterpreted.