Now that autumn has set in there has been a fresh stirring in Karachi’s art world and it is business as usual in the galleries. The group show, ‘Phantasia’ at the Poppy Seed Art Gallery, which featured the works of four contemporary artists based in Karachi, attracted considerable attention. To start with, the statements of the artists were edited and did not contain the usual high falutin philosophical gobbledygook that one comes across at exhibitions which drives the purist into frothing distraction. And the exhibits had a fresh informality which was refreshing.

Babar Mughal, a product of the KSA, who was trained as a graphic designer and whose early forays into art took the form of illustrations on psychedelic music, was the most mature of the four artists. A hardcore existentialist who believes life has a citrus-lined sense of the absurd; he has an infinite reluctance to give a title to his paintings as he believes naming a picture takes away some of the mystique of an intimate experience. It is rather like listening to actors reading the poetry of Auden or Elliot on television, when the only voice you really want to hear is the one in your head.

On occasion Mughal goes off at a tangent and experiments with different themes and styles…‘with an empty mind’ as he puts it. It’s rather like modern Jazz, which can be atonal and where the musician isn’t quite sure at the outset just how he is going to play and hit the blue note.

However, this reviewer feels his true forte lies in his highly discriminating figurative work, especially when he focuses on a single colour and exploits various shades and densities of that hue. His nudes in burnt Sienna, burnt amber and beige are superb. It was a toss up whether to display the picture of the hooded monk with the wispy tail floating in the twilight zone high above the water, or his ‘Windmills’. The latter won as it would reproduce better.

There is a dazzling brilliance about Scharjeel Sarfaraz’s club paintings. A protégé of Ali Imam and a keen observer of how people behave during social intercourse, his vivid and vibrant colours are meant to represent the glitziness and loud atmosphere inside discos and clubs; and yet while the men and women fight for an expression and one can see the odd twitch and subcutaneous vibration, the extempore hair tossing, twiddling and shimmering which goes along with the posing, a strange loneliness prevails. This feeling of emptiness is superbly portrayed in his picture of two women longing for companionship.

Having a Dutch mother and a Pakistani father Samina Islam has a rich cultural background which is reflected in her work. Her canvases are invariably large, warm, positive and well-heeled. Whether painting huge faces of women which fuse into each other through some process of linear osmosis, as she did in an earlier exhibition, or experimenting with surrealism as in the present display, there is a relentless keenness about her work.Islam is a cerebral painter who uses her imagination, and there is a hidden meaning behind her pictures which focus on the balance of life and examine a human being’s inner and outer self. Her painting of her parents in wedding dress, wearing masks as they did in the Venetian carnival, is quite riveting.

Zia Haider’s mixed media on vasli and gouache on vasli, with titles in the vernacular, are quaint, attractive cameos which could form the subject of a separate solo exhibition. Haider has a rare talent and his obsession with detail is marvelously involving.