August 3, 2002

The Pakistan National Council of the Arts in Islamabad is playing host to Rocks of Magnificence, an exhibition by 12 artists spanning two generations. The show is a culmination of the participating artists’ retreat to Skardu, organized by the PNCA in October last year. The exhibition coincides with the International Year of Mountains 2002’ as declared by the United Nations.

Each one of the artists — Humera Ejaz and Nahid Ali excepted — seemed to have been awed by the majestic glaciers and scenic exactitude, never being able to peek beyond the snow-capped mountain tops and rustic charms of a pastoral ‘landscape’.

In the process of individualizing one’s work and making it articulate, an artist has to rely on a sustaining inner experience and thus evolving results. The urge to grow and evolve is symbolized by a characteristic motif shaped like an interrogation mark denoting a spiritual flame of many radiant bands of colour. The compositions in which this symbol features are emblematic and conceived as an arrangement of colour and linear rhythm to support the symbol’s life.

The theme, without the obvious presence of this symbol, is expressed abstractly in Humera Ejaz’s new works in pencil, and pastels and ink, where coiled and flexed segments of colour, associated actively as streams of sensation convey the impression of emergent energy and resonant movement. These works offer further simplifications of the germination theme — formulations that deny even the support of a tangible image.

There is a series of breathtaking moments of naturalism, which reflect Ghulam Mustafa’s strict academic training, bordering on mirrored realism. This is a world apart from his portraits, bazaar, crowded street and shop drawings, and afford a wide-angle view on life. He has worked tirelessly to blur the line between real image and ritual iconography by deflecting the shafts of the sacramental and investing his canvases with transfigured reflections of a rich tapestry of folk culture. He has been able to infuse the modern spirit in this seemingly naive idiom of landscape with skill and conviction. The drawing is still tough even in the garb of folk stylization, and the brush work strong and assertive like his mentor, Khalid Iqbal’s.

There being no walls available for his will to express itself on, Jehanzeb Malik has fragmented a mural conception and presented bits of it in a series of easel paintings done in a grandiose style. Humankind is Malik’s core metaphor, and he is inclined to make a monument out of it. It is in this context that the real content of his art outgrows the complex romantic wilderness of his imagery. A protege of Mansur Rahi’s and a carrier of his cubist innovations, Jehanzeb freezes multiple movements of time which, asserting their persistence, assume the character of a monument built to its own existence.

In Rabiya Zuberi’s case, the disjunction of surface does nothing to detract from the whole. What is more interesting is that where the search for coherent forms has been made by markmaking and subsequent erasure, we are left with a substratum of textures which not only give density and weight, but rather like the pettimenti of the Renaissance chalk drawings, have a similarly symbolic function. It holds on to images providing, as if, the final element to the three-tier process: the first beginning with an undifferentiated level of articulation, the second adding more coherent form-structures excavated from the unconscious to formulate a narrative of the existential view the artist has of the world, and the final offering suffusion of the self in a wider philosophical/spiritual framework.

All works of art originate in life but they should never become mere passive copies of life. Art, as an activity more refined than the objective world and the life it portrays, can thus claim to improve on nature. Whether a work of art reveals a lucid creative mind, a lofty ideal, a profound concept or a strong emotion depends wholly on how accomplished the painter is. Mughees Riaz has literally been places, travelling over the mountains and along mighty rivers, sketching in forests or amid flowers and plants, and produced the works of art for this exhibition. They give but a glimpse of his vast sea of creativity, making one feel the pulse of the time spent in nature, breathe the fragrant air of the lands visited, and be thrilled by the beauty thus portrayed.

What Musarrat Mirza points out is at once remote and intimate. Like the images in a family album, they recall an old experience, an emotion. But while they resurface like objects turned around in one’s hands, they also transform and come into fullness. Simple truths one otherwise fails to see — sunlight, as she employs it to illuminate her work — are brought to focus. Had she lived a few hundred years ago, she would have probably painted a saint contemplating over a skull dissolving in a dazzling stream of light breaking into a dark cell. And she would have thereby communicated to us the ecstasy of a deep spiritual realisation. Such are the antecedents of Mirza’s canvases in which a sea of refulgent light descends from above as if through a chasm in the sky.

With her recent work, Musarrat Naheed Imam moves towards greater abstraction and pictorial autonomy. Her works also become more gestural and range from the sketchy informality to formal density. The environment seems to be made up of opaque dry paint, variously thick but evenly dense. The change is both stylistic and technical. On the technical side, she begins to further her experimentation in wax, egg, and oil-based media and emulsions. The luminous beauty of light is replaced by the sensuous delight of paint.

Fadhil Yousufzai is a consummate technician. His drawing has a frankness of statement despite the inevitable stylisation at different phases. The style he has developed with pastel combines emotive simplification with a colour orchestration produced through variable smudging and softening. In depicting a natural event, he provides the barest summary of the environmental situation necessitating simplification of form, and he does this without resorting to folksy formalism. Fadhil applies colours to maintain the plasticity of forms, which also have firm linear contours. In the larger works in pastel that often resemble woodcuts, a quaint sense of humour veers on the flippant bringing a touch of lightness, while others verge on allegory.

The quality of Nahid Ali’s wonderful painting depends largely on the subtle relationship between the materials she used and the skill with which she manipulates them. Her bird forms, for instance, one perched on the pinnacle and two sitting at the base, are probably intended to lead the viewer to identify with intimate forms within the artist’s subconscious. In Nahid’s only painting on show, the imagery oscillates between the ordinary and the archetypal, where the irony of pleasure haunts the persistence of memory.

The only miniaturist on show, Najum-ul-Hassan Kazmi, finds himself telescoped into contact with the visual facts of a village environment to his great exhilaration. Its very austerity has gone to his head like dry wine, compelling him to take in his stride scenes reminiscent of tourist picture postcards like the Shangri-La and Kachura Lake. He seems to have observed with a keen eye and rendered with an even keener brush.

Pictorially, the space in Raja Changez Sultan’s paintings is not ‘natural’ but one that exists as a flat plane where images can achieve the freedom to levitate. Here, a hand may whimsically reach out to hold a piece of cloud, a figure or a face set sail for unknown regions. Seemingly no laws govern the scale and proportion of the forms apart from those of meditation; yet the sharply or diffused edged images are placed on the surface with a deceptive naivete that conceals a sophisticated sense of design.