April 24, 2004

Jamil Baloch has a special pathos for his roots, for where he comes from. His attitudes, beliefs, accent and outlook are very much a product of his life in his hometown of Nushki situated in the Jamaldini Chagali district of Balochistan.

Jamil is still a boy at heart enchanted with life, its creative power and its promise. He still holds out as a creative person not having metamorphosed into a commercially savvy marketer of his art. A quintessential creative being, Jamil takes pleasure in the process of crafting his sculpture. He rejoices in the process of chiselling and hammering, in the sweat and toil, in the physical challenge of crafting a unique expression from tough mediums of wood or stone.

Jamil dapples in all forms of artistic expression with a passion. He has designed floats for the horse and cattle show, created eight-foot high sculptures in the National College of Arts, which the college requested to keep as a permanent display and he has even designed and made sets for a music videos.

A free spirit, Jamil has had the creative force take him over and make him produce paintings and sculptures from a very young age. To the extent that his artist brother Akram Dost Baloch asked him to visit the NCA while he was studying there. That period was a useful stint for Jamil as he learnt casting and moulding and received feedback on his work from the faculty and students.

Back in Nushki, he would draw on hills with his feet while his younger cousins dug out the earth in his trail, creating large-scale drawings over the hilly surface. Jamil says that he has remained very much a Baloch with a macho stance, with the ruggedness of the harsh rocky terrain that is his home defining his attitude.

The artist spends hours just drawing for the sake of drawing. One of his favourite pastimes for the past many years has been spending his Sundays at the Lahore Zoo, drawing the different animals. The animals he is favourably inclined towards are lions, dogs and roosters — animals that embody power and aggression. He is drawn to their fierce spirit and captures the beauty of their stretched sinews in their struggle for a winning fight.

At the young age of 30, Jamil draws with the facile ease of a master. This is probably because of his passion for drawing and painting that has him exercising this pastime at every opportunity he gets.

The exhibition of Jamil Baloch’s reliefs and sculptures at Karachi’s Canvas gallery earlier this month was the first time Jamil showed a comprehensive body of work in this city. In 2000 he displayed a group of 12” sculptures of burqa-clad women in a group show. Then again in 2003 in a group show he displayed charcoal drawings at the Canvas. But it was this last exhibition that marked his real debut. Prior to that his commitments with various commercial projects were too vast and varied to focus on producing a comprehensive body of work.

The recent exhibition brought together a body of work covering fibre glass reliefs and wood sculptures. In the reliefs Jamil tries to follow a socio-political theme, a trend that is very popular these days. The five reliefs were on a very large scale; three of these measured seven by four feet each and the remaining two four by four.

The first relief was titled ‘Bound Fairy’ and showed a screaming woman with wings, doubled up and strapped in a clamp. The clamp was made out of thick solid wood with metal bolts in it, while adjacent to her was the profile of a man with a severe expression, with dark hollow sockets for eyes. The rough treatment of the profile with linear strokes captured the strong emotive content of the man’s expression. The overall rough and raw treatment of the work lent itself well to the portrayal of the rawness of emotions, embodied by the screaming women and the harshness seen in the man’s image.

In ‘Bound Fairy’ Jamil attempted to portray the injustices and inequality that women encounter in a male-dominated social set-up. This work was compositionally well laid out. Yet the usage of the wings in ‘Bound Fairy’ reeked of the popular influences that are currently prevalent in Lahore. That said, it remained very much the work displaying Jamil’s style, where he uses rough texture to portray emotion.

In the remaining four pieces the style of rendition and the features of the subjects altered significantly. He used simplified stylized features with linear, closed, eyes. The face and figures had a uniformly smooth treatment, with an accompanying uniformity of expression and posture as all the women had eyes closed and heads bent forward over their folded arms.

The latter works were unable to rise above their cliched titles as they were devoid of the emotional content that might otherwise have given them an impact. In their plastic smoothness they were but appealing pieces with little of Jamil’s artistic capability on display. His seven sculptures likewise had little impact as they varied in style and subject matter; some stylized, some with African features and influences.

There was no cohesive underlying style that would mark the work as Jamil Baloch’s. Yet this exhibition marked a point where he actually put together a body of work, and perhaps with more confidence in his personal style he would one day let the real artist genie in him loose, so that one eventually sees works that are worthy of his name.