Seventy-year-old Paris Biennial Laureate Syed Iqbal Geoffrey, who currently lives in the garden city, is a one-man phantasia. A barrister famous for his pro bono cases and his championing of controversial causes, he has become the enfant terrible of the Lahore bar.
But he is chiefly known for his art, especially his conceptual art process systems and what he refers to as post-modern miniature painting. And this is an area in which he has a few rivals in Pakistan. He has been painting since 1951, when the hungry trawlers had not yet started to harvest the sea’s upset meadow in the land of the pure and painters had not yet been programmed for competition.
The great art critic and anarchist Sir Herbert Read, whom this reviewer had the honour and pleasure of meeting over lunch at the Good Earth restaurant in London during his student days, had a special liking for Geoffrey’s work and once described him as ‘an astonishing phenomenon.’ In 1964, Sir Herbert dedicated a lecture at a university in Wisconsin to this talented young man who, in the words of Read, ‘has entered into an exclusive destiny.’ He saw in Geoffrey’s art the work of a highly civilised and modern man trying to find a pictorial language appropriate to the sensibilities of the modern outlook. Is it any wonder that Geoffrey is one of the five artists during the last century who was chosen for the prestigious Sir Herbert Read medal?
Geoffrey had been living in Europe and the United States since 1960 and, according to his own admission, returned to his native land in 1990 on the urging of Faiz Ahmed Faiz. He was equally at home in the company of the rich and famous with their timitus of patronage who regarded him as something of a radical pioneer; as well as in the company of the Bohemians in the Latin Quarter of Paris, with their Fellini-esque characters who looked like a cheek-by-jowl remake of La Strada.
Geoffrey has held over 200 one-man displays of his works in different parts of the world, and his current exhibition, ‘Just-Art Tenschöns’ is being held at the Koel Gallery. This is his sixth in this port city, which he enchantingly refers to in his introductory note as Karachi-by-the-sea, after Shoreham and Portslade on the Sussex coast. He has dedicated the show to the memory of a string of artists—da Vinci, Caravaggio, Duchamp, Amrita Sher Gill, Sadequain and Savonarola.
Most of the 44 canvases on display are collages—a technique made famous by Picasso, Braque and, of course, the great Matisse whose three pictures ‘Jazz,’ ‘Icarus’ and ‘Nu bleu’ were a stunning success when they were first exhibited. If these masters had still been around, this reviewer is certain they would have been impressed by Geoffrey’s 14 inch by 10 inch cameos. Four of the portraits within the spatial setting are easily recognisable—Marilyn Monroe, Ruttie Jinnah, Queen Elizabeth II and the most famous face in the history and literature of art—the Mona Lisa.
But what makes the images so special is their treatment. Geoffrey has to an extraordinary degree the decorative impulse, and there is a distinctive polished uniformity in the quality of each design. In his works one sees the love of pure decoration, the patient elaboration and enrichment of surface, the predilection for flat tones and precision of contour, the extravagant richness of invention. Each composition is simply dripping with jewels, and there is an obsessive quality to the detail that pushes the style ahead of the substance. Whether it is an umbrella in a cloudless sky or a bugle, each object has a distinct role to play in the universal symphony.
When this reviewer asked Geoffrey how long he took to complete a painting he said in his slow, precise elocution that work on some of the canvases that were hanging on the walls actually started in 1951, though most of the pieces on exhibit were created after 1995. With the patience of a Florentine craftsman he would, every now and then, add a dab of paint to a composition, or a line of calligraphy or stick on a postage stamp—as the fancy took him. In other words, a painting is never really complete. To this reviewer, however, they look like perfect finished works of art.
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