KARACHI: It is a positive sign that in an age where conceptual art has taken the world of visual expression by storm, modern-day Paki­stani artists, young at that, are still employing media such as watercolour to put their message across. A group exhibition titled Water and Colour that is under way at the Full Circle Gallery is a testimony to the observation.

Five artists are taking part in the show: Anum Ashraf, Arif Ansari, Farooq Aftab, Muntehaa Azad and Sadia Arif.

Farooq in one of his untitled paintings uses the metaphor of the boat. It has a couple of connotations –– journey and fertility, because at the heart of his visual narrative is the river which helps people both earn a living and get to one place from another.

Anum’s triptych ‘Eup­horia’ leans more towards experimentation. The artist makes an impact on the viewer by turning images made in watercolour into scenes that are legible and at the same time have a bit of an abstraction to them. It adds a layer of meaning or purpose to the making of the artwork.

Muntehaa in ‘Lush’ adheres to the serene ambience that one generally associates with the medium employed by the show’s participants. The artist calls it ‘dreamy and hazy’. It can be taken as that. Still, it is the feeling that the viewer gets from fine painting that is more on the dreamy side than hazy.

Sadia remains more or less on a similar plane with her good-looking floral imagery. In her statement she writes, “I paint primarily to depict the beauty of light and the delicacy of the medium enables me to capture the range of variations in value and colour that light reveals.” Spot on! Include in it the phrase ‘aesthetic grace’, and the viewer will get the drift of her subject.

Arif comes from the same school of thought but his creative emphasis on ‘ocean, sky and weather’ lends his work a distinct position where detailing is key. Distinct is the operative word, though.

Published in Dawn, May 15th, 2019