When I was in Saigon last February a chap who ran an art gallery showed me a painting which he described as a stream-of-consciousness. It reminded me immediately of that passage in Ulysses where Molly Bloom publicly rakes her unpunctuated consciousness which D.H. Lawrence described as the most lewd passage in English literature.
The problem with this kind of art is that when it is good it imparts a sort of editorial semaphore of irony and disbelief to the viewer. And when it is bad it travels the short distance from hubris to nemesis. I haven’t yet seen anything quite like that in our neck of the woods, though quite a few artists have experimented with different styles and themes.
Quite a few, however, stick to the straight and narrow, tread the beaten path and like to paint just what they see, relying on aesthetic appeal for success. They don’t tease the viewer or ask him to search for hidden meanings. Ali Azmat’s recent exhibition ‘Dialogue’ at the Canvas Gallery in Karachi belongs to this tribe — the clan that believes that there will always be a place for traditional representational art.
There were 21 canvases which depicted a female sitting, standing, brooding meditatively or just staring into the distance. The pictures had a refreshing spontaneity. They were intimate without being intrusive and inert without being dull. At first glance it did look as if the subject had been painted separately and stuck onto the background like in a montage. The outlines were distinct and defined. But that was the clever part. It was jolly well done. The picture which I found the most alluring was the one where the woman wears a dark orange kameez over a white shalwar with thin leafy branches of a plant spread across her frame.
In the past I have had a problem with artists’ mission statements; primarily because they appeared to be translations from the vernacular and ended up containing a lot of phrases which didn’t quite connect. However, when I took a closer look at the paintings, they suggested that more than one person had been involved in the creation of the images, and so I had to revert to the document. It turned out from the artist’s note that ‘Dialogue’ was a joint effort of the painter and his four-year old-daughter Ada.
This accounted for the inexplicable presence of butterflies, the wisps of white cloud, the medicated sticking tape and tattoo on the arm and a sketch of a little girl, her skirt billowing in the wind. The sketches are not embellishments. They are an essential part of each composition, a bringing together of two generations. In the words of the artist, “It felt like breaking strong and long-standing barriers and my daughter and I, an artist and a child, reacting to each other’s works resulted in a surprisingly refreshing language, something that I had never experienced before.”
In my home, it is a case of three, rather than two generations when my granddaughter Sarah decides my prose cannot be complete unless she has stuck in the odd palm tree or camel. It looks like Ali Azmat might have started a trend.
