March 13, 2004

There is something insidious in the way the eye glides over an Unver Shafi painting. Maybe it has to do with the application of flat, plastic colour on broad canvasses, the sinuous design to please the eyes. Here is a hint of bone crushing bone, the hedonist’s pelvic view of the world, for there is a lot of turn of bum and thigh here and even full frontals. Large canvasses on which float black-rimmed bones, crossed legs, broken spinal cords, the rise of the buttock and the renal passage, and even, sometimes, seven-by-seven feet labia.

In the application of paint on canvas and in his anthropomorphic allusions, Unver Shafi’s work is a continuation of his earlier concerns with one important twist. In all his work, Unver Shafi laboriously builds layer upon layer — brown-red, pink-grey — to abstract the form, a simplified line framed in block contrast. Shafi loves to do large diptychs, canvases joined at the hip, in a manner of speaking, his forms rising out of the canvas, dirigible, derelict.

The further the painting is placed away from the viewer, the more it looms at him or her. His abstracted figures cast no shadow, show no movement, and exist outside time, but seem to be solely occupied with achieving optical clarity. But it would be a mistake to take Shafi’s surfaces as raucous invitations, even though they are so in the face, because one has to remember his painterly skills and his deft sense of humour.

It is, ultimately, not embodied desire, the contours of the human flesh simplified through a single colour, that hold the viewer, for in his hands it is self-consciously over-narrativized, hyperbolic, a trope that he works with. His work seems, rather, the self-consciousness of the skin of the canvas where he paints the surface of a surface in a colour statement.

In an abstract expressionist mode, what would an artist not do to tease the viewer and draw him or her into admiring his skillful play, the act of creating skin and bone tones, large caressing movements of paint on a taut canvas. Unver Shafi may not be painting easy sexuality but abstracting from it, almost punning on the human fixation. This is much clearer in his smaller figurative work included in the latest show at the Canvas gallery, Karachi, where he is more playful with content, less guarded about painterly technique, and decidedly decorative.

Here, Shafi does a complete turnaround in his choice of medium and formal treatment of the surface, illustrating in bold, red caricatures what can only be described as a decorative pictorial of carnivorous conjugality. Shafi daubs rich Indian colours into closed spaces creating a claustrophobic, staged, batik encounter. Here are male and female forms sometimes transforming into cocks and bulls in orgiastic stupor, or into each other, conjoined, invasive. Perhaps unwittingly, the work echoes Anwar Saeed who painted similar barbs with a bite in screaming acrylics on paper.

But ultimately, what is interesting for anyone who has followed the painter’s career is not a display of his virtuosity with the medium or how it seduces the eyes but, more importantly, how it grows out of its earlier skin. There are at least two large diptychs that point away from themselves into a new direction.

Here, the artist seems self-reflexive, moving away from his love of style and scale in creating beautiful designed objects. He shows his perhaps first engagement with the sublime more than the beautiful. The first painting titled ‘Homage to Ali Imam’ shows crossed legs in one half, and what looks like a large vertebra in another. Unver dares to bare the manic brushwork, the vital lines of drawing, the nuances and the tonality of the legs-and-bone forms. Etched in black against a miasmal blue, this may be one of the first few paintings where the artist is peeling away from the plastic lucidity of his other work to bare the bones dressed in golden robes. Here, Unver Shafi is working through black depth.

In another diptych Shafi abstracts what may be the rear view of a seated female nude in one half, reducing the form further in the next image of a round cross-section of wood, hinting perhaps at how he carves undulating images out of the virginal canvas.

With formalists like Unver Shafi, the question of impression or representation remains moot. He has been classed with American abstract expressionists like Avery, Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, or Judd by other writers, a tradition that Unver Shafi legitimately draws upon since he was educated in the United States. Except that unlike these artists, his condensed texts are romantic, corporeal. Like a true Pakistani, he feels the exaggerated need to confront issues of hypersexuality.

Unver Shafi is a second generation Pakistani painter with two decades of work that display an astonishing homogeneity and occupy a near-perfect plateau of success. But even as the glazed surface of his paintings seems a metaphor for ease, of plenitude, existing outside time and beyond space, it is a luminous lie because it naughts the artist’s hand, eliding the question of subjectivity. The artist lives in a glass house, realizing more than anyone else, what a commitment to failure is required of one who stays committed to painting doggedly, diligently, with the end of self-edification.