KARACHI: Imagine the following combinations: urban life and basic instinct, works of master artists and baser elements, memory and images that go beyond memory lane. Put together, don’t they sound fascinating? And what if they are realised visually so that the viewer can put his/her own spin on the binaries? That’s how intriguing an exhibition titled ‘Monument valley’ of digital triptychs made by French artist JFrancois Chenin is. It opened at T2F on Wednesday evening.

There are hints of pop art in Chenin’s work, but then drawing on some renowned artists’ works and bringing ostensibly disparate scenes together to form a whole indicates the artist is trying to interpret things in a transient setting. The first piece is called ‘The journey begins’ and that’s where the viewer has to be careful because the journey has already begun and he has joined it somewhere in the middle or near the end. Yes, the reference to American art is there, what drives the show is the energy that Chenin’s characters, colours and images exude. Even in the artwork ‘Lovers’ confusion’, which is self-explanatory because it touches upon human frailties, the palpable energy moves away from the physical to an intellectual realm.

“When I was a child, I used to make collages by cutting pieces of paper,” said Chenin while talking to Dawn. “I’m interested in human emotions as well as in composition of an artwork. So what you see is taken from different artists’ pieces assembling them in one space to form a collage.”

The artist insists that his work is open to interpretation, which is the right way to study art. This is the reason why, to this writer, the artwork ‘Opportunity’ nicely captures the rat race, as it were, that is inescapable not only in matters pertaining to economics but also to the ever so engaging man-wom­an relationship.

And it all ends in ‘Texas, Paris’, where the exhibits form a veritable gestalt.

The exhibition will run till Sept 24.

Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2014