August 25, 2007

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Lest there be any confusion in the matter, it is not an evil queen who asks this question in this version of the story. It is a dwarf who cannot measure up to the sophistication and subtlety of Arif Mahmood’s photography. His latest show ‘Multiple Spaces’, mounted at Karachi’s Canvas Gallery through the last two weeks of August, subverts the very frame that the camera imposes on an image. Where the frame limits, encloses, and isolates, Mahmood, instead, summons it to open out new dimensions, and thus, to reveal and share the 360-degree vision of his third eye.

Explored by European painters such as Rembrandt and the miniaturists of Indian courts that the Dutch master investigated and collected, as well by Japanese printmakers such as Hokusai or filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, the false or internal frame has a long history and far-flung geography. It has been used as an ‘illusionistic’ device as in the paintings of Rembrandt, where a fan held by a sitter leaves the limits of the window framing her, to trick the eye into believing that the two are not on the singular plane of the canvas.

It has also been used to draw emphasis to the portraits of emperors in larger court scenes depicted by miniaturists, or to similar effect in architecture. In the hands of artists like Bergman, the internal frame has been used to yet another end of reformatting the limits set by the outer frame of the image by breaking it up into smaller windows.

Mahmood’s thoroughgoing investigation of this formal question in ‘Multiple Spaces’ does all this and more. For here, within a single photograph, the internal frame of a car window lashed by rain breaks up the scene of train tracks stretching into infinity, while the side-view mirror enclosed therein reflects two approaching figures against the backdrop of an imposing colonial building. The image within the image is, therefore, not merely a compositional device but has narrative — even metaphysical — value as in the paintings of Iqbal Hussain, and before him to the end of pure formalism, Zahoorul Akhlaque.

Of course, as with any work of art that transcends the illustrative into the territory of the sublime, the enigma of the narrative remains intact in Mahmood’s photographs. For though the symbols collected in the crucible of the image are in dialogue, they are not telling a straightforward story. Sight through an eye opened in the side of the head by way of the mirror serves as a reminder that there is more to the scene thereby revealed than might be apparent. Quintessential paradox: superior vision makes for greater doubt.

It is possibly this doubt or the growing complexity of Mahmood’s compositions that makes this show so different in both temperament and form from his 2005 exhibition at Canvas. An oppressive stillness pervades this body of work where his last show documented the vigour and vitality of his subjects and the fleetingness of the moment they inhabit. The drama of nature and simplicity of design is replaced by the cinema of urban life: cluttered, confused and utterly untameable.

As Mahmood loosens his grip on his Realist project, and steps into the realm of the abstract, large swathes of the image are plunged into darkness, or concealed by dust or some other texture or structure. Communication is foregone for communion. But, to quote that controversial preface to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”