KARACHI: In art, are craft and content mutually exclusive or mutually reinforcing? Or are they interdependent? This is a difficult question to answer. It becomes all the more difficult when artists such as Ghulam Mohammad, an exhibition of whose artworks opened at the Canvas Art Gallery on Tuesday, dazzle the viewer with their tremendous skill and the ability to approach subject matter through their technical prowess.

Ghulam Mohammad, winner of the prestigious Jameel Art Prize, makes the phrase ‘hard work’ sound quotidian, a piece of cake, if you like. The paper cutouts that he uses as his medium seem like a regular exercise for him, but in reality it requires a great deal of skillfulness, patience and passion to achieve the feat that he aims for. Here’s why: he cuts out Urdu letters from different sources and re-collects them to diminish the textual-visual binary in order to come up with something entirely new. And the result is astounding, as in the case of the very first untitled exhibit (paper cutouts in glass bottle) on display.

Then, quite effortlessly, he allows content to take precedence over technique in a remarkable diptych called ‘Manfi wa Musbat’ (paper collage on wasli). Of course, those of us who are familiar with the Urdu language know that manfi means negative and musbat positive. The incompleteness that the two pieces give away leads the viewer to infer that there’s more to the idea of the two opposites, and that, perhaps, there’s a thicker grey area in between them than we tend to expect.

Now let’s come back to the skill part of the artist’s oeuvre again. The untitled exhibits in which he has used paper-weaving belong to a different realm of exquisiteness. There’s a certain tenderness to it that only top-notch artists can exude.

The exhibition will continue until April 6.

Published in Dawn, March 29th, 2017