Hafsa Nouman’s Facsimile & the Colorless, All-Color

Installation view, left to right: Hafsa Nouman, Once Ubiquitous, Dadi ki chirya (diptych), 2026, oil on canvas; The Wavering Horizon, 2026, oil on canvas, 42 x 54 in.; Ground, 2026, oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in.; Aam ki chaoun mein, 2026, oil on panel, 8 x 10 in. Courtesy of the artist and Palo Gallery.

By TARA PARSONS July 22nd, 2026

When you think of the color white, you may think of a blank slate, snow, the landlord’s special, banality, purity, and nothingness. Each image conjured contradicts the last, as Herman Melville questions: "[Is] it that, in essence, whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?" (Moby-Dick). In other words, white's mythos arises from its incongruous ability to be both presence and absence. This paradox anchors the leitmotif in Pakistani artist Hafsa Nouman’s debut solo show, Facsimile, at Palo Gallery. The exhibition showcases Nouman’s oil paintings alongside the installation Dastarkhwan, all of which are recreations of photographs of symbols of South Asian heritage—indigenous fruits, traditional dining, and wallpaper. Yet, the canvases’gleaming finish and pervasive white disturb the passive viewing experience. While white often signals the erosion of South Asian culture in Facsimile, it also functions as a site of regeneration. 

Hafsa Nouman, Tehar Jao, 2024. Oil on paper on wood panel, 29.5 x 41.5 in. Courtesy of the artist and Palo Gallery.

Nouman roots her practice in the dastarkhwan, a traditional mode of South Asian dining that takes place on the floor. Her understanding arises from her experience growing up in Pakistan, an economy reshaped by Neoliberalism and extraction. In her previous Dastarkhwan (2024) and the new Dastarkhwan (2026), the artist replicates her grandmother’s dastarkhwan, as pictured in Tehar Jao (2024), using canvas and paint. As 20th- and 21st-century industrialization reoriented Pakistani consumption towards Western material culture, the dastarkhwan became an ethnic object deemed lower-class relative to the refined Western tabletop. By dining on the Dastarkhwan installation and activating it, Nouman revives a custom ideologically suppressed and colonized. In Facsimile’s oil paintings, her continued engagement with South Asian cultural emblems probes the broader social impact of Western soft power on postcolonial Pakistan.

Nouman’s oil painting draws on her prior installation work and training in Mughal and Persian miniature painting to endow her canvases with a distinctive, resin-like finish. To do so, Nouman uses poppy oil and ensures no brush touches her surface, only the paint. She uses this technique in Wavering Horizon (2026), Ground (2026), and Aam ki chaoun mein (2026). The group attempts to mirror the destabilization of urbanization—the ancestral homes and native ecologies destroyed for multi-story apartment complexes, four-lane highways, and factories—by literalizing the figure-ground relationship. Aam ki chaoun mein, placed towards the ceiling, shows a mango in foliage; situated by the gallery floor, Ground depicts the mango’s yellow pollen on concrete after a monsoon, and Wavering Horizon, located eye level with the audience, portrays where the mango tree's roots touch the ground. The paintings’ physical and compositional organization requires the audience to strain to see and to spend more time contemplating each. To heighten the sense of spatial disorientation, Nouman mixes her paint on the surface, creating a gradient reminiscent of Gerhard Richter's squeegee technique. The hallucinatory, blurred colors and the luminous poppy oil leave the audience with no stable vantage, an alienation that reflects the fractured landscape urbanization reaps. 

Hafsa Nouman, Zaitoon, 2026. Oil on canvas, 8 x 12 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Palo Gallery.

On the wall opposite, a group of paintings depicts fruits: Zaitoon (2026), an olive; Aandhi (2026), a jamun; Breaks Open; Janat ka dana (2026), a pomegranate; Chusa howa Aam (2026), a mango; and What is the Desired Fruit? (polyptych) (2024), which depicts an apricot, the stone, the seed being crushed, and the crushed pit with whiteness in place of an almond—the desired fruit. Nouman selects these subjects because they’re “fruits of resistance”: in Pakistan, the urban sprawl requires the destruction of these fruit trees to industrialize, so planting them is an act of defiance. When the artist copies her subjects from photographs, she only paints the fruit, cropping out their floral origin as if her brush plucked them from their tree. Like Wavering Horizon, Ground, and Aam ki chaoun mein, the canvases’ glossy finish captures these anthropologically exact fruits, as if suspended in formaldehyde for display in a natural history museum. Similarly, the white backdrop, like a sterilizing tray, frames the fruit like diagrams in a science textbook. Though the paintings at first appear to monumentalize fruits of resistance, each stylistic choice constructs a scientific perspective, symptomatic of Western modernity. Consequently, the heightened point of view implicates the spectator’s visual consumption as a part of the same extractivist ideology that underpins environmental destruction.

Hafsa Nouman, Jaali (ii), 2026. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 8 x 12 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Palo Gallery.

Akin to the fruit paintings, the Jaali series (2026) represents the titular South Asian pattern as it is progressively covered by white. To create the series, Nouman treats the surface as a wall, building up layers in acrylic of grey concrete, orange rust, and white drywall before using oil paint to create the top layers of the pattern. The chronology of the titles and curation posits the white as covering up and erasing this cultural emblem. Yet, even in the final all-white Jaali (iv), the ridges of the jaali pattern remain under the patina. Since Nouman’s process scrapes paint from Jaali (iv) to reveal the preserved Jaali (i), the series must also be viewed backwards. In Jaali (i), the slightly exposed underlayer reveals the white wall from which the pattern arises. In other words, the memory is only sublimated by white of modernity and can return if given space.

Next to the all-white Jaali (iv) resides Dadi ki chirya (2026), a diptych of the verso and recto of the manuscript, where a blank page is followed by a house sparrow, a copy of the one from her grandmother’s mango tree. As the diptych compositionally suggests renewal, white appears as a blank slate and the source of color. Nevertheless, like the fruit paintings, the sparrow is suspended in white and ensconced in the glossy finish. As such, the bird feels unsettling and artificial, an incompatible graft of the distant past onto the present. As much as Dadi ki chirya (2026) aspires to revival, the hyperrealism of the subject concedes the difficult journey to restoration.

Partial installation view featuring Hafsa Nouman, Dastarkhwaan, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Palo Gallery.

The dastarkhwan reemerges at the crux of this tremulous negotiation between erasure and renewal, anchoring Facsimile’s central canvas, Tehar Jao. In the painting, Nouman replicates a photograph of the dastarkhwan at her grandmother’s. Her painstaking brushstrokes release it from being an archaeological relic whose remote use can only be imagined. Likewise, the artist brought the Dastarkhwan for dinner at the gallery during Facsimile’s run. As participants re-activate the piece, Nouman records the traces of the meal's plates, courses, and utensils to create an index of its use and ritual. 

Though the paintings in Facsimile remain inert reminders of the audience's complicity in their effacement, Dastarkhwan brings the tradition to the present. As much as white becomes a sign of erasure that will never allow traditions to be the same, the white space led to its creation and can unveil a present where it lives again.

Hafsa Nouman: Facsimile is on view at Palo Gallery from June 18 to June 30, 2026.