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In his new works 'Not made for each other', recently shown at VM Gallery, in collaboration with London-based Green Cardamom, Ahmed Ali Manganhar processes the pedestrian art of painting cinema hoardings into a painterly exercise. This relocation of cinema billboard art from its vantage public venues to an exclusive gallery space challenges the autocracy of high art with the veracity of popular culture.
Bawdy, garish and titillating, the local cinema billboard is not just a film advertisement, but a piece of public art that has roots right in the heart of populist culture. Its loud chromatics and inflated imagery centralising on the emotive appeal of heroic gestures, soft romance, raunchy frolics and comic gesticulations provide the man in the street with a free fantasy trip in just a glance—yet in aesthetic parlance this art is kitsch and not worthy of consideration.
Originally a native of interior Sindh, Manganhar was weaned on the primitive culture of billboard painting long before he ventured into formal art education at NCA. He reminisces, 'As a child I spent much time watching the craftsmen who came every Thursday to my small town, Tando Allahyar, from neighbouring Hyderebad and Mirpurkhas. They came to paint large film billboards in water colour, within three hours—the masters asking students to make graphs, to paint in middle tones in a half-finished form that seemed so magical to me. Then the master would take the brush and lay out the finishing touches in fluorescent colours that brought alive the faces of the actresses but killed the painterly quality of the image.'
Today, a practicing artist and lecturer at NCA with local and international showings of work to his credit, this small town resident has made it to the big city but the nostalgic impulse continues to inform his work. Giving new meaning to 'kitsch,' not as a ploy to capitalise on the coarse and the crude, but as a sincere effort to reconnect with his cultural roots Manganhar mixes academic art theory and technique with the homespun ordinariness of regional culture. He creates a narrative that is essentially personal, but in a broader sense it also contributes to the current exploration of the indigenous and the home grown for a more authentic art expression.
A film buff, Ahmed Ali taps into Lollywoods golden years as well as the Indian classics to extract fragments of billboard imagery that best identify with his premise of 'Not made for each other'. His approach in some of his paintings mimics the ethos of Urdu shairi (poetry) where the mehboob or sanam (beloved) is often an imaginary reference to which the poet addresses his heartfelt sentiments. Based on personal musings, desires and emotions Manganhar has lifted specific images of actors painted on billboards that complement or set off his thoughts to telling effect within aesthetically composed frames. Building a fact fiction equation, he chronicles moments of his life as portrayed through those images and at the same time critiques commercial films as deathly 'dream merchants' where cinematic reality is at odds with actual existence. In this overlap of contradictory realities he creates the polarities that define 'Not made for each other'. The most obvious is the Waheeda Rehman and Guru Dutt paintings hung on two walls directly opposite each other to signify their famed cinematic pairing and real life distance. Weaving the personal into the reel and the real standing of icons like Waheed Murad and Sultan Rahi and yesteryear Punjabi sirens like Aalia, Aasia and Najma not to mention atrocious villains like Adeeb, he persuades the viewer to engage with the art.
At this juncture it is important to bring the artist's context to the viewing experience because the paintings are watered down versions of the original billboard art. Peeling away the superficial layer of gaudy fluorescent overtones the images stripped of their thunder are a tame spectacle. This state of incompleteness is intentional—it recaptures Manganhar's childhood fascination of watching a billboard painting in the making only. The slapdash brushwork, the base undercoat effect now interwoven with the artist's memory, his present sentiments and aspirations is the artistic statement. A mutation, the painting now has another life as an independent artwork. Presently this new expression is exciting but still rudimentary—and Manganhar's best is yet to come.
The accent on cinematic billboard visuals in this exhibition sheds light on the craft/art disposition of the genre. Billboard painters can be considered an intermediary link between the craft artisan and the fine artist as they execute their craft through the act of drawing and painting but in a traditional manner. Comprising unlettered ustads and shahgirds operating in bazaar studios or street workshops / addas this practice has been the initial classroom to several aspirants from the hinterland who went on to graduate as artists from academic institutions. They carry with them a vernacular art history that is begging to be archived and reopened for fresh inquiries.
