KARACHI: What is surrealism? For anyone who loves art, the question is a little pedestrian and, in a certain way, sounds like a query that is not relevant to the 21st century art sensibility. After all, eminent writers, artists and thinkers, such as Andre Breton, have said so much about it that to define it would be to trivialise the whole concept. But can we help it? So, surrealism is “juxtaposition of irrational images” in order to diminish the distance between dream and reality.

An exhibition of seasoned artist Shakil Saigol’s artworks titled Surrealism Revisited with Shakil Saigol opened at the Canvas Art Gallery on Tuesday. Is it the very definition of the ism that has made the artist revisit it or is he trying to impart a new meaning to it? Well, it could be a bit of both, because in his statement he says he has returned to his “earliest preoccupation with surrealism after 30 years”. And quite an interesting return it is.

Saigol teases the viewer by blurring the line between what’s real and what’s imagined. His artworks lean towards the former but in such a way that reality loses its conceptual essence. He creates a dreamlike ambience and at the same time puts in the foreground disparate images that defy its oneiric state and make the picture look like an intriguing scene out of real life. The ‘Cobweb Memories’ series (gouache, opaque watercolour on arches paper) is a cogent example of it. The posture of the girl is real and the cobwebs make the reality eerie, transporting the artwork into an unreal domain.

In ‘Vengeance of the Lotus’, Saigol goes a step ahead with this noteworthy process and adds a new dimension to the dream-or-real question by presenting the dilemma of an individual as the dilemma of a certain time period (related to the individual). One moment the viewer is left bewildered to identify the actual lotus in the picture, and the next moment the cracked face and body of the protagonist pushes that sense of bewilderment behind, and the agony assumes larger proportions where it doesn’t matter, anymore, whether what you’re feeling is true or not.

There are multiple symbols at play here, lotus and cobweb being two of them. There are also three exhibits in which zebras take centre-stage. Now the zebra, among other things, symbolises balance. This is what makes ‘Zebra Phantasma’ (oil on canvas) a striking work of art. The artist wants us to think beyond the obviousness of symbolism.

The exhibition will run until May 4.

Published in Dawn, April 26th, 2017