KARACHI: What happens when a master artist makes the constant barrage of dismaying news reports his subject? He turns it into a series of episodes from history — to be written later.

The reason for it is that we live in an age where information is being constantly thrown at us. It becomes fodder for artists. They cannot steer clear of it. This is exactly what has happened in the case of the great painter Ijaz Ul Hassan, whose latest body of work titled New News Newest can be seen at the Canvas Art Gallery.

Mind you, there are some really hard-hitting exhibits, in terms of content, on display. They will immediately transport the viewer to particular incidents that in recent times kept them glued to their TV sets or transfixed on newspapers. A diptych called ‘Kidnapper’ (archival print on flex) is one of them. The image grabbed from a TV clip in which a man is holding a young girl’s hand walking to an unknown destination tells a disturbing tale. What Hassan is doing works in multiple ways: one, it makes us realise how society is increasingly getting desensitised (or benumbed) to handle-with-care issues; two, it underlines our insatiable hunger for the news, even at the cost of our degeneration; three, it goes to show that the one group that cannot prefer anything remotely bad to goodness –– no matter what circumstances dictate –– is the artist community. The latter needs to be understood carefully because Hassan has not tried to show how good an artist he is; instead, he expresses himself as a thinking member of society, someone with a heart of gold.

This is also evident from his statement. “I prefer to warmly embrace the viewer who is not the ‘other’ but my ‘other self’. This impels me to proceed with our shared narrative and conventions, focusing on the current, the immediate and that which I regard as primary concerns of the time, likely to advance and connect ‘us’ to the future.”

‘Do Raha’ (oil on canvas) is a piece that will remind the viewer of how effortlessly Hassan diminishes the line between art and life. There’s a bit of a Robert Frost poem in the painting –– the confluence of two genres and two worlds.

The exhibition concludes on May 2.

Published in Dawn, April 28th, 2019