Faruqi's play with polarities is interesting — he uses vibrant chromatics to project the bleakness of the modern urban environment and creates guarded tight-lipped characters to gives voice to a complex, emotional narrative.
Painting estrangement between genders as a peculiarly urban malaise has been central to Moeen Faruqi's art since its inception in the '80s. Recently shown at Canvas Gallery, Karachi his current exhibition 'Unreal lives' continues to negotiate the precarious yin yang equation through a complex terrain of dubious sentiments. His figures weirdly insular, hemmed in by issues and framed in categories enact a mute battle of the sexes.
For audiences already familiar with Faruqi's pronounced, largely unvarying but very established signature, the show will come across as more of the same but for the uninitiated there is much to explore theoretically and technically. His oeuvre takes inspiration from the cubist fragmentation of space and metaphysical displacement of form and thrives mainly on rudimentary figurations and a garish palette.
The protagonists in his compositions, always everyday male and female figures, are simplistically drawn and crude in appearance. It is their stiff body language, grim unsmiling expressions and sad, withdrawn, questioning or accusing eyes that spell a twisted storyline. Primitive, brash applications of shrill primary hues like red, yellow and blue against pale, bleached whites and ochers play a crucial part in animating the painting to its visually loud pitch.
His play with polarities is interesting — he uses vibrant chromatics to project the bleakness of the modern urban environment and creates guarded tight-lipped characters to gives voice to a complex, emotional narrative. A vast repertoire of symbols, animal forms like cats, fish, owls and parrots, wine bottle/glasses, playing cards, chessboards and indoor planters as well as mosque minaret and skyscraper images are staples in a Moeen Faruqi original.
Computer chips, warfare jets, calligraphy puzzles are some new insertions but an overuse of signs and ciphers confuses their symbolic significance and their inclusion comes across more as a chromatic and pictorial strategy by the artist.
While Faruqi is at his most comfortable with the creation of the bizarre and the arcane there is nevertheless a method in his madness. Most compositions in this show centre on three in a relationship, mainly two men and a woman, and rarely vice versa. Is the third protagonist a villain, an alter ego, or is it a ménage a trios arrangement? The titillating readings are open to inquiry.
A few paintings hinting at same gender preferences, reflective of present day liberalism and focus on such acts, seem contrived and clichéd. His painting referencing the existentialist philosophy of individual existence, freedom and choice are far more intellectually motivating.
Pen and ink sketches by Faruqi, a new addition in this collection, are a rare departure from his original style. However, the compositions and technique lack the vigour of his signature works and seem to be in an elementary stage. Similarly his three dimensional experiments, fibre glass objects, busts and panels of the male face are interesting extensions of his visual vocabulary, especially the 'Storybust' series, but they do not emit an independent sculptural presence. The plain realistically rendered blue and red busts are bland in comparison to the undercurrents of tension and chaos rippling through his paintings.
Problem pictures an extraordinary feature of Faruqi's work. Left with questions unanswered and mysteries unsolved spectators have no choice but to speculate. In view of the conflict that oppresses the characters in Faruqi's paintings it is possible to discuss his compositions as social and psychological studies of personal loneliness and failures of communication. This alienation may also be an expression of idiosyncratic and esoteric lifestyle choices that result in an urban menagerie of varied social types and groups.
But then again to describe these works in conventional social and psychological terms is to fail to appreciate what is most radical about them, which is that the imaginative energies they release go far beyond their own realistic structures of representation. If viewers dwell on discovering the mystery and the poetry, which alone could make bearable the lives of such people, they can transcend the nihilism that jumps out from the picture plane at first glance. Indeed the problem pictures' ability to generate discussion is the biggest pull factor in the artist's work.
