Dripping colours, dragged brushstrokes, juxtaposed dabs of red, blue and crimson, and a strong imagination defines Anila Zulfiqar as a painter who expresses her identity through conceptual landscapes. Her style appears closely related to the impressionistic technique but she does not capture the effects of the varying light; neither has she worked rapidly on the spot to encompass the real-time change in the atmosphere as an Impressionist.

Instead, she focuses on the imagery based on her imagination and subconscious, which processes her memories emotionally, from childhood to the present times, resulting in a synthesised visual expression creeping over her small canvases.

She takes her time to furnish her painting by applying strokes over strokes and dabs over dabs of the desired range of synchronised and juxtaposed colours, which never correspond to a certain time or light condition of the day. This unique combination of impressions and imagination undergoes a colourful transformation to get a meaningful and chromatic appearance as enchanting paintings.

Anila Zulfiqar’s artworks are a distinctive combination of impressions and imagination

At Hamail Galleries Lahore, Anila Zulfiqar mounted her second solo show “Symbolic Representation of Self with Space” which she dedicated to her late father who departed this world a few weeks back. Those who have seen her first exhibition on the very same walls could recall a gradual change in her palette as red, pink and ocean green shades seem as interesting additions to her ochre-green and royal-blue pigments. She is not an on the spot painter who works on the details of light, capturing an exact moment in time.

However in her mind she goes to a certain location, mostly to the Walled City Lahore, Anarkali or Railway Station vicinity where she has been roaming around in her childhood, and then paints that particular environ at her studio, recalling that specific imaginary surrounding. This process gives her style a sense of percipience and synthesis within the layers of exuberant paints. Especially in her conceptual cityscapes, one can relate a building or a wall to some parts of the old city Lahore but cannot identify the exact location as these images represent the nostalgic associations of the painter rather than the accurate geographical scales of the metropolitan. Moreover, her brush drips and drags a little more when she handles the blurry imprints, out of intentional and unintentional imagination, on the canvas under this emotional charge and energy, leaving behind a sense of personal and psychological indulgence of the artist with her work.

The artist spent her childhood in the Railways Colony that has inspired her visual experience to transform as her subject matter for the paintings; railway tracks, stations and activities around ― like colourful clotheslines or the gypsy huts installed beside the tracks.

Zulfiqar is currently living in Saudi Arabia and the window of her apartment opens towards the vast turquoise of the Arabian Sea. This exposure added a new tone of the ocean-green and ocean-blue to her palette, which shows the importance and effects of the atmosphere on the artist that may manifest through a visual expression of reciprocal colours. However, at the same time, and quite interestingly, her geographical displacement only varies her colour palette whereas her subject matter could never unchain itself from the intersecting labyrinths of the old city of Lahore.

This show, along with a sense of Déjà vu, suggested that the painter’s inspirations are technically Impressionistic, but conceptually fall under the Surrealistic approach.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, April 5th, 2015

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