While looking at art in an art gallery, visitors often verbalise their visual experience in order to interactively construct meaning. By placing the artwork in different contexts, interpretations keep changing and multiple interpretations of the same piece are formed. A key role in this contextualisation is reserved for the viewer’s self. The differences in interpretations lie in what the viewer knows and has experienced. Does this mean that an art object is limitless and viewers can use free interpretations? Critical reflection is necessary to direct the different possibilities of interpretations while giving meaning to an art piece.

Recently a solo exhibition titled, ‘Lyrical waves’ by Fariya Zaeem at Islamabad’s Gallery 6 portrayed images that provided viewers with a channel to understand contemporary paintings without significantly applying labels to them. Zaeem graduated in communication design from the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi in 1996. During most of her professional life, she has remained engaged with the leading advertising agencies of the country. While holding two solo shows and participating in six group shows in Karachi over the last seven years, this is her first exhibition in Islamabad. In this show, the artist’s work consists of mixed media and watercolour on paper.

One could associate Zaeem’s work as based on ‘Lyrical Abstraction’, a descriptive term born in Paris after the Second World War. A representation to an opening to personal expression, a larger spiritual outlook is infused into the artist’s paintings. Similarly in Zaeem’s paintings, a sense of mystical sensibility comes through where she has an inclination to acquaint viewers with concepts, ideas and emotions rather than exploring principles in art such as tone, line, value and texture.

Her work reminds one of New York-based American abstract painter, Ronnie Landfield. Spirituality and feeling are the basic subjects of his work where colour is used as a landscape, a feature that is noticeable in the artist’s work. Viewers have an immediate response to Zaeem’s large scaled paintings, a sense of visual music, immense energy that externalises what she feels within. Her sweeping strokes and all-embracing gestures depict intuitive expressions and generate a persuasive sense of depth.

There is a balanced, inventive rhythm that is immediately felt in Zaeem’s displayed pieces. Lively, animated, subtle and soothing but above all, charged with meaning. After years of being in the advertising agency and evolving her painterly qualities, her paintings have transformed and developed with her.

Watercolour being her favourite medium due to its translucent characteristic is a prominent feature in the paintings. The colours in some images are so transparent they visually appear to glow on the paper whereas in others, the brightness and textural attributes are a result of Zaeem’s use of acrylic paint.

A certain design element is apparent whereby the spontaneity is overtaken by a contrived pattern in some pieces.

Colour, space, and vigour describe Zaeem’s images where the viewer is transported into a world where colour is the essence of existence.