Contemporary miniature provides one of the most compelling contradictions in our art, as its practitioners continue to innovate and explore the boundaries of form and content against the backdrop of the age-old Indo-Persian miniature painting tradition. Most visible is the scale, which does not only pertain to a shift in medium and therefore of scale, but is necessitated by the imagination that internalises and confronts the historical, political and social references, and realities of this time in the subtlety borrowed from miniature.

Irfan Hasan, trained in miniature art at the National College of Arts, Lahore, is holding his first international solo exhibition in London at the prestigious Grosvenor Gallery in collaboration with the Canvas Gallery Karachi, this October-November. Since his graduation in 2006, the artist has not only broken away from a romanticised and embellished picture plane of his predecessors, but he has made connections in form and imagery through the re-invention of the classical European figure, and asks questions into the nature of historical influences on aesthetics and the nature of the colonial experience in a post-colonised society. Sans censorship, or exclusion by choice, this narrative is bound by the freedom with which it embraces the figurative, and poses queries of cultural and social taboo that it invariably questions.

The artist’s work located in a different trope, perhaps also time zone, establishes its reverence to human flesh. As a young artist, he admired and copied works of European masters, works which he had only seen in magazines and on the internet. At some point, he explains that he felt it necessary to acknowledge this experience. His colour palette has consistently remained flesh tone based; he tests and matches it on his hand, constantly dabbing paint on his flesh. The reference to the body such as in ‘Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time — after Bronzio’ (2015) comes from an articulation of seeking beauty in the pleasure derived from the body, from sexuality, temptation and joy. Incidentally, in the original work, the figure represented by a bearded ‘Time’ rushes to pull a curtain over a scene, as Venus turns to kiss Cupid. The gesture of covering and uncovering can find its representation in the social structures in Pakistan and the relationship to the painted image.

Irfan Hasan makes connections in form and imagery through the re-invention of the classical European figures in his current show

Hasan manipulates the two masks on the bottom right, adding a moustache over one, and making the eyes hollow, as if they exist in non-space. Seeking an almost surrealistic space, the artist insists that his work should be read within the space/s he creates. It is not the realism and engaged detailing of form that seduces the viewer, but what the artist intends to do with what the form symbolises. He renegotiates with the original composition, whereby part of figures are omitted but connected through a faint line.

Incidentally, this connection between cultures, between the past and present, and perhaps the future, is also a connection between different realms of existence. In ‘Equality before death — after William Adolphe Bougureau’ (2015), it seems as if Bougureau enters Hasan’s canvas, his space; this is another gesture where the notion of time does not seem to exist as we expect it to, and the boundaries between this world and that are separated by a thin line. Barely visible, the vastness of the raw white alludes to a presence rather than absence, as the artist manipulates the picture plane to express his reality.

In the new work we see a mirror image, which may refer to a state that was expressed through earlier references to Lucien Freud and a psychological state of mind. “From Courbet to Gudrung” as the title of Hasan’s show suggests, travels through time and beyond. It is about his time, his experience and his form.

Within its many layers and subtext, within the many histories it brings into conversation, it may not be the questions of how neo-miniature deviates from the source which once was. It may be more pertinent to look into how it seems to be transforming the nature of art in the context of Pakistan, and how it may be interpreted both locally and internationally, as it also confronts the local by virtue of the freedom it entails.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 1st, 2015

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