May 8, 2004

Operating on a border very much of his own making, between figuration and abstraction, Jamal has made a sturdy case for regarding his choreography of spots, stripes, discs, arcs, swathes, lozenges, arrows and wavy bands as always representational, saysAasim Akhtar

Jamal Shah’s colour has a strange quality of simultaneously seeming totally invented and yet being natural. Aside from its general affinities with the heightened, decorative colour of Matisse and Derain, his colour is sometimes so far out, so blatantly charged with retinal stimulation, that it catapults the artist out of the context of the post-impressionist sensibility into a zone all his own. At times, this involves a density of colour that may well be related to Jamal’s knowledge of the subtleties of Indian miniature painting, where the architectonics of pictorial construction are wedded to a metaphysics of colour densities.

In Jamal’s case, however, the result is a kind of implosive baroque dynamic that makes his pictures often seem much larger than they are. There are even pictures in which the artist’s colour appears on the verge of being out of control, but his studied talent for adjusting the size of his marks to the projective power of his colour keep the images at just the right pitch.

Jamal Shah is a representational painter as opposed to being a painter of appearances; he does not license you the attempt to read a specific emotion from a given picture — as if that were what the picture was about. His formula is as elegantly withholding (it) as it is incisive and alert.

When Jamal first took to painting in the early ’90s, he had already established himself as a reputable sculptor and printmaker, with a Major in sculpture from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and a Masters in printmaking from the Slade, London.

“The reason why I chose to major in sculpture could be the subconscious influence of my self-taught uncle, Aziz Jan Agha. Before the great earthquake, he used to sculpt effigies of Ram and Ravana varying between the minuscule the monumental. Another reason for taking up sculpture was that it was taboo. Sculpture was not just politically controversial but also surmounted to an act of radicalism and non-conformism.

“The theme of my thesis work at the NCA was human relationships and their survival in a hostile environment. Women who had been deprived and shorn of opportunities, who in spite of all their potential had been made to act like somnambulists, took on the configuration of shrouded, faceless creatures with a strong posture in my work. Men, on the other hand, appeared exhausted, physically fatigued, and naked. Nakedness was supposed to depict relatively distorted sense of freedom while the figure itself became a vehicle to express my growing frustration with the times.” The works were modelled in clay, wood, bronze, terra cotta, plaster, and finally, fibreglass.

For over two decades Jamal, as an artist, has watched and considered the changes in art around him, but he has never let fashion dictate his fundamental interests. Aware that art’s major enemy is pretension, Jamal steadfastly appreciates the elegance and fact of using limited means to send complex signals. In this sense, he is an idealist.

In its thoughtfulness, steady development, benign lucidity, and range of historical inspirations, his work refutes the notion that the high ground of late modernism is necessarily made by rejecting the past. Like Jamal’s work, memory is an accumulative blending of glancing episodes. Once done with the NCA, he was asked to set up the Department of Fine Arts at Balochistan University in Quetta, and together with Kaleem Khan and Akram Dost Baloch, he became a pioneering spirit joined in by Feryal Gauhar.

Returning to Quetta had meant returning to his roots. “Possibly because of the rawness there, people are closer to their cultural roots — this is what leads on to a directness, intensity and purity in their expression”, exclaims Jamal. “I headed the department for three years until my departure to England on a British Council scholarship”.

When he found out that the bronze-casting foundry at the University of Reading, where he had enrolled, was ‘dysfunctional’, he opted out for the Slade on Batholomew dos Santos’ and John Aiken’s advice, but went to printmaking instead. “Printmaking was a very frustrating experience in the beginning. As opposed to sculpture, it was an indirect method of image-making. Initially, I couldn’t work, the reason being that I was away from home when, back home, it was a period of political turmoil.

“On top of it all, London was boringly soggy contrasted with the arid landscape of Quetta. That is when rain began to fascinate me. My first print was about a tramp who gave away his clothes for an umbrella. It was much appreciated by my teachers probably because it reflected on my sense of isolation at that time”.

Those two years in London brimmed Jamal’s life with lucrative activity: he saw exhibitions, participated in rallies, made friends, and absorbed the current trends in theatre when “prior to that I had only been familiar with the Brechtian theatre of protest”, admits the artist. He recalls his meetings with Vanessa Redgrave and Han Su Yin at Aamer Hussain’s residence. “Redgrave was very knowledgeable, enlightened, and sensitive to issues pertaining to human rights. She expressed her interest in seeing my work, even though I felt she just wanted to release her liberal guilt by patronizing a Third World artist. But the very next Sunday, I found her outside my door.”

Jamal’s works of the 1990s have not only involved the depiction of a remembered visual moment, but have also reflected an array of feelings and scenarios that make up the artist’s extended relationship with particular genres. Theatre is definitely one of them.

Back in ’85, Jamal had already done ‘Kohkan’ about the coalminers in Quetta for the PTV. Auditioned twice by a team of British experts, he was chosen this time to play the character of a poppy farmer out of a multitude of 500 aspirants in the film entitled ‘Traffic’. Since then, Jamal has launched a parallel career in professional acting, production and direction.

The tramp did not resurface in Jamal’s work, and was replaced by elements of the local landscape, flying rickshaws, prisoners of fate, children, dogs, and rain drops. The image began to develop from a compositional device into a symbol. “I started to paint on doors, and found its design flexible in surface and challenging in composition. It was an attempt on my part to harmonise painting with sculpture.”

The pictures done on wood seem to heighten their rectangularity. Usually modest in size by current standards, they seem boxy, blunt, even heavy, because of the proportions of the frame to the interior of the picture, with the form of a window displaying a ballet of plump shapes which are enclosed within thickly emphatic brush strokes that frame or shield them. The pictures are packed with cunning design and thick, luscious colour.

Having not totally renounced painting’s other primary resource, drawing, Jamal fielded the most inventive, sensuously affecting colour repertory of any contemporary Pakistani painter, giving colour its most coveted and sumptuous exclusive victory. The Doors were first displayed in Dhaka and later at Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan.

There’s as much an impulse to play down as to reveal the charge of some of the pictures in Jamal’s oeuvre. While offering a shrewd spread of signals, from the diaristically off-hand to the bluntly plaintive, the majority of the titles in his work are casually nominative or slightly ironic, which makes them nicely at variance with the pictures’ proud exuberance of feeling, their buoyant, ecstatic palette.

“Everything is allegorical in my work. Dog is a very important character in my painting because I feel sympathetic towards this poor animal. One may have heard the great poets reciting ‘sang-o-khisht muqayyed hain aur sag azad’ or ‘sag-e-zard barader-e-shagal, sag bash barader-e-khurd nabash’. They are not dogs of the Samraj — they could very well be sag-e-awara,” he says.

Paul Valery wrote in 1932: “One must always apologize for talking about painting.” Jamal may often be en-voyage, but not as a beholder, as a rememberer. A trip is an intensifier, a licence to the avid eye. You need the separation from home, and then you need to return home, to consider what you have stored up.

“In 2001, I was invited to an interactive workshop on Geoffrey Bawa’s estate in Sri Lanka called Lunuganga. The theme of the workshop was gender politics. I made a huge cage as an installation around which an Indian and a Sri Lankan dancer staged a performance, filmed on video. As night fell, I mounted a white parachute cloth against the light, and gave brushes and paints to each participant in the workshop. We painted the moving shadows as the dancers continued to perform.”