April 10, 2004

Someone described Khuda Bux Abro’s works as ‘pictorial journalism’. The action in his paintings and mixed-media works is topical enough in that he is predominantly concerned with issues such as the recent atrocities, the passivity of the crowd, the brutality of the mob and the inconsolable grief of women. But he is not a journalist; he does not always report on specific events, his crowds collect for ritual ends in unidentifiable places, and his police bear down upon the defenceless in what may be regarded as the ambience of a dream, rather a nightmare.

Abro, whose works went on show recently at Nomad Gallery in Islamabad to coincide with the International Women’s Day celebrations, was never directly involved in politics, but even as one on the fringe he could feel and suffer with that lost generation. Through his colleagues in the press he became aware of social issues and learnt to approach everything from an unconventional angle.

Suspicious of the accepted values of a class-structured society, Abro was, on the other hand, horrified by the meanness and petty factional rivalries that plagued the revolutionaries. He was amazed to realize later that the entire political and social system had great propensity for this destructive urge, and that even the artist community was not free from it. Abro has tried to find valid images for such experiences as they inwardly affect him.

Though strongly attracted to the works of Max Beckman, Kathe Kollwitz and George Grosz, he has never consciously imitated any of these artists. He admires the strength of their graphic vision but, as far as he is aware, has never been consciously influenced by their style.

Abro does not read much into pure abstract and geometrical works except in terms of intellectual and compositional relationships. While he can enjoy these aspects in them, they are too cerebral and unemotional to move him deeply. In a figurative work, he feels he can reach out beyond the picture to aspects of social reality and establish a direct relationship with life. On the technical side, he has tried to be true to the mediums he employs.

He enjoys linear shapes and forms. In composition, he emphasizes the modulated black regions with particular zones of cross-hatchings and various shades of grey. When he uses colour, it adds another element to the pictorial scheme.

Abro’s settings are almost entirely urban; landscape and other elements of nature do not intrude his cityscapes in which the predicament of man lies in the artificial surroundings of his own making. He is, at the same time, too rational to look at the city as being malevolent or diabolical. In fact, part of the fascination of his work lies in its preoccupation with the visual poetry of urban existence. He has a love-hate relationship with the city and the extraordinary energy of its seething life, and is roused to anger by its desecration or by the brutalization of its citizens by social and economic pressures.

Woman tearing at her own flesh committing suicide, woman bemoaning lost children after abortion, and woman as a ‘baby-producing machine’ are some of the harsh subjects he paints. In conception and scale they appear mural-like in character. The analogy with William Blake, not intended to be qualitative, certainly does pose a problem.

The urban revolution is one that is being continuously fought, not by idealistic revolutionaries and ideologues, but by humble beings who reconcile its differences through the pattern into which they shape their lives. Figures become luminous patches of ochre and the background a dense deep blue in Abro’s current show.

The translucent are released from the ground and they produce a spatial ambiance. The colour areas do not describe the figures, but a human presence shines through them. They are conceived not as mere formal equivalences but as image resonants of the artist’s intimate emotional responses.