At one time, he prayed five times a day and practiced Kathak dance in between. At one time, he left his middle class comfort and pre-medical education halfway and started sweeping the floors of Ali Imam’s gallery.

One time he was a powerful art director of a TV Channel, at one time, he lost his vocal chords after a thoracic surgery went wrong and found his inner voice teaching art to poor children in rural areas.

And Riaz Rafi’s canvasses revel in these contradictions.

The funeral processions in bursts of vibrant colour.

Scarlet lips disconnected from despairing eyes and band aids.

Musicians playing as naked bodies turn blue.

Rafi’s 1996 exhibit mused over the exploitation of prostitution. A decade and a half later, his work ponders whether criminalisation and veneers of respectability are any better.

The demonic red prostitutes on the edge of the canvas give way to the faceless female in the center, verdant green, the colour of mainstream religiosity and nationalism dripping blood-like down her face as it drapes her body. On one canvas; sexual exploitation expressed as a consensual waltz, on another, the depth of poverty.

The solids of color cascading over amorphous shape-lifting human vices become frantic individual strokes as the forms become recognizable individuals: Benazir Bhutto and Colonel Qadhafi after assassinations.

While Rafi’s connectedness with social issues remains constant, his work has grown. The sweeping graceful curves of his earlier calligraphy are edged out as sacred verses splatter over a disarray of jarring colour and mingle with chaos. His dark themes no longer need a dark palette. Like society, Rafi’s canvasses give us the choice to accept surface aesthetics or interrogate what is festering below.

— Text by Nazish Brohi/ Photos by Shameen Khan/Dawn.com