Chaos as a disruptive force is a fertile ground for the visual arts. For over a decade now some of Pakistan’s most innovative art has been fuelled by the constant political and social flux. Shazia Qureshi’s, ‘Organised Chaos’, show at VM Art Gallery, Karachi, is among the most recent exhibition of paintings that gives physical expression to the air of confusion, anxiety and despair that is clouding the country. As if affirming the reality behind conspiracy theories the title of the exhibition, ‘Organised Chaos’, establishes the necessary context within which the works should be viewed.
Hinting at super power intervention, and the role played by anti-state elements and involvement of hidden hands in orchestrating pre-planned strategies to destabilise the country, the artist focuses on the trauma the average individual undergoes in a rudderless society.
Such pandemonium is well expressed through the abstract applications of paint where the intensity of strokes synchronises with the artist’s emotional pitch. It is this coordination between the artist’s feelings and her physical expression that imparts strength to her painting.
Playing with dramatic contrasts of light and dark Qureshi constructs glimpses of huddled conspiratorial figures stealthily emerging from or receding into indeterminate, disordered spaces. Her entirely abstract /formless paintings are also direct translations of emotive states like fear, helplessness, rage and turmoil. Using fluid shifts of colour, bitumen, a variety of drip techniques, scraped and etched textural effects and small add-on bits, she builds her painterly trajectory with the sensibility of a printmaker.
Her colour palette is a mix of vibrant golds, oranges and reds contrasted with murky greens and muddy browns which support the aura of turmoil she is portraying. In sharp contrast to Qureshi’s agitation, it is the utopian recalls of journeys to distant lands that prompt Tahira Noreen to visualise her series of urban skylines. Blurred and hazy, her cityscapes are dreamy configurations of shifting structures in soothing pastel hues but it is the clever use of scotch tape as an art making device that is the actual standout feature of her work. Rather than painting a landscape she constructs the architectural imagery by pasting narrow cut-out strips of transparent coloured tape onto acrylic sheets.
Opting for soft watercolour hues she creates movement and fluidity in her imagery by skilfully overlapping the tapes to create subtle differences in colour. Intricately handled, her tape art emits a translucent glow and can be viewed from both sides.
This experimental technique began with rectangular plates of pasted plastic sheets encased in light boxes. Containing delicately incised/cut-out images of overlapping circular and organic forms these sheets eventually gave way to concrete images built with strips of transparent Chinese tape as an art material. Noreen graduated from the National college of Arts, Lahore, in 2008 and this is her first solo in Karachi.
An important contribution of artists today is to highlight the critical mental aspects of technique as opposed to the merely physical application of paint on canvas. The exhibition has two individual shows with distinct concepts and approaches but both emphasise the importance of technical treatments as inventive and creative segments of art making.
