September 14, 2002

It is easy to pass by soulless work but art from the heart can accost the viewer, compelling confrontation. The Holy Sinner: Sadequain 1954-1987 is not jut a befitting tribute to Pakistan’s great master-painter — a retrospective of such magnitude and intensity — it is a staggering proposition.

Prodigious, prolific, but essentially throbbing with soul, this is art driven by inner compulsions. Decapitation, an artist severing has head off in a self-portrait, is a powerful emotive image. Its capacity to unsettle reminds one of other disturbing self images of artists like Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Kaethe Kollwitz, etc. Artists expressing such inner turbulence often employ highly personalized technical vocabulary, which is almost always a direct translation of their emotional pitch. It is not contrived; rather, it develops with the intensity of their feelings (turmoil).

Sadequain’s artistic spirit oscillated from linear to painterly. If we can read poetic lyricism in Chughtai’s delicate, free-flowing unbroken line, then surely Sadequain’s crude crosshatching and thorny pins and needles can easily evoke agitation and suffering. He manipulated the broken line very effectively to bring out his own brand of raw emotion.

From scratchy etchings he went on to spiky cacti in the five line variety. However, his emotional fervour was given emphatic expression by his consistent use of the bold jagged line in black, with which he outlined his pictorial forms. Rendering his cumbrous figures and narrative symbols in flat colours, he brought them to life with strong linear insertions for facial expressions and aggressive contouring to shape the body mass. His iconic cacti mass is also a jumble of clawing thick and thin delineations.

Direction of lines also have a strong bearing on the impact of a painting leading the viewer’s eye to a focal area of interest. It can also indicate movement and mood. A horizontal layering often suggests a relaxed calmness, whereas a vertical direction may denote authority, strength, stiffness, striving, etc. Diagonal and undulating lines bring an element of action and activity to a painting. The markedly upward thrusts and, to a lesser degree, the oscillation, zigzags, quivering, bristling and brandishing strokes in Sadequain’s figurative and calligraphic works carry tremendous momentum, specially noticeable in his murals as well as paintings like The Last Supper, Red Sun over Cactus Land, works executed for Naqoosh-i-Iqbal, as well as many others.

If empty spaces can speak volumes about an artist’s sensibility then clutter can also address an artist’s perceptions. In Sadequain’s case painterly chaos could be directly related to inner ferment. Accessories adding descriptive content to his figurative and calligraphic works emerged not only as picture-making elements but also brought design and pattern value to his expression. His rendering of these supporting features, like the rest of his oeuvre, was crude and primal. They burgeoned in an irregular, sharply geometric and prickly fashion.

Sadequain’s palette was generally sombre with a strong preference for blue-greys, sludge-greens and ochres. He did have his vibrant phases but almost always his chromatic tonalities were contained by his heavy black contouring.

One can read many technicalities is a Sadequain painting but it is far more important to feel the ethos of these graphic renditions, to sense the spirit the works emit. Satirical, macabre, poignant, agonized, Sadequain’s emotional repertoire is really extensive and one is overwhelmed when viewing the current collective in unison. This show is bound to spark fresh debate on the artist’s present stature, in that his ratings might yet go up by quite a few notches.