KARACHI: Artists oftentimes portray life in their art as an enigma. That’s understandable: after all, so much happens in a single life and with such rapidity that just when one starts to make heads and tails of things, something new and confounding comes up. An exhibition of Imran Ahmad’s artworks titled 2+2=5 opened at the Koel Art Gallery on Tuesday. Although the name of the show talks of a mathematical equation with the wrong result, it is a nice little metaphor for the seemingly simplest of questions that are put to human beings but in reality have complex answers — sometimes no answer at all.

Imran is interested in time and space. This sounds like fondness for metaphysical notions. It is and it is not. After all, it is through one’s own physical experiences that one tries to grasp the ideas that exist beyond the physical domain — so both apply. In the artist’s own words: “Dots, lines and tones vigorously scratch the metal to construct images from the conscious, the subconscious and the pleasure of mark-making with strength and energy leaves me with abstraction narrating long stories with only a stroke… The new body of work is based on exploring techniques such as dry point and line etching while depicting my daily life experiences from my surroundings.”

The artworks on view are done in series and as standalone pieces, perhaps because the artist wants to convey to the viewer that his subject matter, albeit nonlinear, has a sequence to it. He keeps the sequence rooted to the ground with the ‘Nature’ series. As the show progresses the pieces under the rubric ‘Sketches’ and exhibits such as ‘A Door and a Window’, make the viewer realise that the dots, lines and other geometric shapes such as square are there to probe the everyday realities which are connected with our non-physical — not necessarily spiritual — plane. Upon close inspection it will become clearer that there’s kinetic energy to his effort signifying movement from one space to another, carrying queries that keep disturbing the thinking souls in their creative lives. And Imran’s moving exhibits do that effectively.

The exhibition concludes on Dec 16.

Published in Dawn, December 3rd, 2020