eality in the hands of Arpita Singh is not a solid, static or stale subject. She selects segments of reality, like a painter picks pigments of paint, to create a version that appears unseen but not unbelievable. In that respect, her art, currently on display at the Serpentine North Galleries, London (March 20-July 27), has similarities and parallels with magical realism, the literary genre of Latin America (initiated by Alejo Carpentier, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante and others in the 1960s).

Elements that frequent words and images, but are strongly rooted in the hemisphere once described as the Third World, underdeveloped or developing nations, now referred to as the Global South.

Known for political upheaval, ethnic violence, religious extremism, economic disparities and colonial pasts, these regions are also recognised for their rituals, superstitions and shifting notions of physicality and dream, between the tangible and the magical, and their beliefs in reincarnation, repetition of events and recycling of time. This perception of reality, if compared to Western/ Cartesian logic, is deemed elusive, irrational and illusory, hence fantastical; although García Márquez declares: “There’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”

Perhaps it is not the difference in reality, but the lenses used to view it. In visual art, there have been diverse techniques to render truth, from European naturalism, Chinese idealisation, Indian miniature formalism, African minimalistic figures, Celtic stylisation, Cubism and black and white films to holograms and more. Each is linked to the concept, language, material and technique of a community and epoch.

Arpita Singh, in her art, blends streaks from varying sources, eras and traditions to create a synthesis that represents the condition of a person who resides in South Asia, yet is exposed to the world beyond its physical dimension, while remaining deeply rooted in immediate circumstances; a citizen of multiple poles and periods.

At her Serpentine exhibition, Remembering, her first solo show outside India, curated by Tamsin Hong with assistant curator Liz Stump, one recognises a particular visual language: familiar, yet uncanny for an eye accustomed to believing in a singular and imposed order. It is the kind of art world that Indian artist Gieve Patel described in Daedalus (Fall 1989) as one of “successive schools, movements and manifestos, each attempting to progress beyond the last one in its understanding and portrayal of pictorial space.”

By contrast, Arpita Singh’s work (from the 1960s to the present) reveals a gradual shift in the artist’s voice, from formal to personal, to poetic, to mythological, to political; often mixing several registers in a single canvas.

That vision of reality is illustrated through the texture of Singh’s voice, the painter’s mother tongue. It mirrors the way a mother tells tales, recalls memories, recounts episodes and fabricates stories for her children, where actual incidents and imagined happenings merge seamlessly. Dream mingles with daylight, fantasy meets physicality; personal experiences take on the weight of fact for others, as the artist herself explains: “What is a dreamlike, imaginative world to you is a real world for me.”

Her world is simple, but not straightforward. Characters appear engaged in mundane activities - Manjeet and a Friend Talking (1990); Couple Having Tea (1992); Party at Ram Sharma’s House (1994) - but what unfolds in the margins renders these scenes uncanny, arresting fields of description. This is further explored in works with equally understated titles: Munna Apa’s Garden (1989); My Mother (1993); Perhaps My Mother (2002); Girls (1985); The Listener (2010). Across these, one senses a quiet unease among characters who recur from one canvas to the next and often multiply within a single frame.

The result is work that, in its surface and sensitivity, feels more like tapestry than traditional painting.

Her aesthetics reveal a reality that cannot be photographed but told; that cannot be documented but narrated. It is not scientific, neutral or clinical, and therefore not cruel, but formulated, private, personal and thus passionate. It is up to storyteller to determine how to unfold the beginning of the world for a reader: a man waking up to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin; or, facing the firing squad, a person remembering the distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice; or two passengers conversing while plummeting from twenty-nine thousand and two feet towards the English Channel after their plane crashes.

Singh’s narrative is a woman’s story about the world around her; a changing stage, where the female figure can be a fusion of the ordinary woman, a deity and a film actor (Devi Pistol Wali, 1990), balanced on the crouched body of a man, holding a gun, a mango, a pot of flowers and two ends of her sari in five hands.

This phantasmagorical scenario, in which multitudes across South Asia (and beyond) believe through their faiths, folklore, cinema and social media, is masterfully created by Arpita Singh. Aircraft flying over back gardens; a man riding a white tiger amid astonished maidens; a car approaching a blank double bed; people, furniture, vehicles and utensils scattered on either side of a pathway, these all signal spaces where anything is possible. Acts of love, compassion, and crime are all imaginable. More than three-dimensional arenas, these resemble maps, where conceptual activity outweighs physical position.

Singh’s magical reality, like that of the masters of this literary form, is produced by arranging elements of nature in such a way that one is inclined to believe in them. Gabriel García Márquez, explaining how to make fiction appear factual, once remarked: “If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.” It is this balance between everyday observation, happiness, fatigue and frustration that completes our picture of the external world. In this way, each painting by Singh does not depict a different reality, but rather a unique story of individual existence.

Her world is populated by familiar figures, middle-class individuals or office workers and their conditions (as in Man with a Black Jacket [2005] and Men Sitting, Men Standing [2004]); pairs of men in the backyard of a house; groups seated on red chairs; a woman reading a newspaper. In her later work, as her subjects expand to include politics, her compositions take on a manuscript-like quality, echoing Indian court painting. These concerns are often intermingled. A number of paintings reference conflict, war and contemporary violence, occasionally with religious connotations, though often portrayed obliquely. For instance, My Lilly Pond (2009) depicts a soldier crossing the sea toward a continent where other army men are killing civilians. The words “Guantanamo Bay”, painted in small letters within the work, point to the political context. Similarly, demon-like figures annihilate humans on the lower half of a map-like terrain (possibly South India), while red deer occupy the upper half in Searching Sita through Torn Papers, Paper Strips and Labels (2015), a painting that alludes to an ancient episode of violence.

Using metaphors drawn from religion and references to contemporary events, Arpita Singh weaves her imagery with care and complexity. A masterful manipulator of paint, in her recent canvases, she appears to stitch visuals together, placing small patches of mismatched colour and interlacing imagery with text. The result is work that, in its surface and sensitivity, feels more like a tapestry than traditional painting.

In both content and structure, these pieces reflect the information overload of our times, the noise of fake news and the flood of footage. Singh disrupts this chaos (sometimes literally, through visual fragmentation) to form a language that is poetic, precise and painterly, a vocabulary she has been crafting for more than six decades.

The writer is a visual artist, an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be contacted on quddusmirza@gmail.com.