‘The Body’ — exhibiting figurative art

Meher Afroz showcases her resplendent work at the Koel Gallery.

KARACHI: Artist Meher Afroz recently showcased her exhibition entitled ‘The Body’ (in six by three feet [ft]) at the Koel Gallery. Conceived by late Mr Ussman Ghauri and curated by Mr RM Naeem, the show suggests the need for a critical history of modern figurative art in Pakistan. This, at the same time, briefly returns focus to the world of our live bodies.

Eight contemporary artists were invited to work on canvases in specific dimensions — six by three ft and six by three inches — with the essential requirement, that a human form must be represented in each set. For the commission, Ms Afroz worked from motifs off her earlier Poshak series of paintings. Although here, in a delayed return to the canvas after Mr Ghauri’s death, a mood of genuine privation emerges in her work. This senior artist contributes by far the most sophisticated composition to the show and also, as virtue, perhaps the quietest.

“Khud Kalami” (self address) is a montage of clean flat planes, or so it seems, in the first instance. A haunt of faces and two disembodied cloaks comprise the necessary figural gesture. Disturbing in their countenance, disfiguring, mute, the spectral forms are, in turn, submerged in a palette of rich, luminous, nocturnal, blues.

One feels estranged as a viewer, as though looking intimately at the solitude of strangers. Here is a fable, perhaps, about inexpressibility. Or, if observed within the strictures of the exhibition, here is a perspective on “the body” beyond its anatomical confines.

Ms Afroz is known, today, both as a pioneering print maker and as a painter par excellence. After her arrival in Karachi from Lucknow in 1971, she was variously claimed as an artist of the subcontinent; her work, a study of belonging, placed her alongside the oeuvre of artists such as Zarina Hashmi and Nahid Raza.

In terms of method, her canvases are defined by a dedicated exploration of texture-building techniques. Her imperative, “to layer, scratch, emboss, pigment, until the surface coalesces with detail, to form [an independent] pictorial language.” This practice inaugurates, for Ms Afroz, the work at hand. It also begins to reveal her understanding of ‘art’ as an interrogation of historic process.

At closer view, the simple geometry of “Khud Kalami” reveals layers of intricately mixed colour, mirrored over in champa flowers and in repeating sequins, culled from Islamic design, now visible, textile, now made opaque by another layer of blue, ferozi, lit, as though we were witness to an expanse of early morning light.

At closer view, the canvas is marked too by scratches. Features form and the suspended faces emerge sculptural, humane, caged in. The canvas assumes vivid tension. Its surface begins to age.

Ms Afroz describes her work in terms of a palimpsest, or a visual manuscript, in which contemporary marks give way to expose earlier, erased images in the same space. In other words, for something to be considered contemporary, it must contain, within its own parameters, layers of other, relational cultural histories.

Building textures into a canvas is then not merely or not singularly an aesthetic pull for Ms Afroz. It creates a temporal template, within which motifs appear and may be sustained. And, as per this painting, it generates the very atmosphere for communal self address.

Finally, it may not be coincidental that it looks like an oversized miniature painting gone awry. One may read the art work as a movement between spectral social form and the suggestion of a vast, rich spiritual terrain, our own. It is here that “Khud Kalami” achieves its most laudable effect. In terms of surface harmonies especially, it is literally a ‘beautiful’ painting. And it is conceptually a significant work — at once disturbing, critical, directive — within the realms of contemporary Pakistani art.
Note: Digital reproductions of Ms Afroz’s paintings suffer from loss of surface detail.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 29^th, 2011.