Short Talks on Tassaduq Sohail
The best of his work is either imbued with a feminine quality or is complexly engaged with it.
KARACHI:
Not everyone is a cool-eyed customer, come in to view Art. Once a woman will walk in, devastated by love. She seeks nothing from the gallery but imaginable refuge. And she finds herself surrounded — by a drift of coloured fish, or a cream-coloured horse slipping its own outline, veined and pouring mountains, or a naked woman, her body turned exquisitely away. The viewer eases her sense of the real. Here lies a bestiary, and a dwelling place. The gallery space is transformative.
II
The artist’s studio is a cell, enamoured by a large easel and bereft of natural light. Turpentine, linseed oil, an unnamed bottle line the roughshod table. Used tubes of oil paint cover its surface. A neon work lies drying. The palette knife is 45 years old. It carries his motions. Women, garish, frontal, naive, surfeit the studio walls. All from live models, or from the longing of them, indicates the artist. He sits amidst dust, speaking profanity, smiling sweetly, discussing Picasso’s line. After a life of work, there is little to hide. “They are everything.” They are mothers, daughters, mermaids, prostitutes, patrons.
III
At the age of 82, he has seen much world. From Jalandhar to Lahore, London, Karachi, Tassaduq Sohail has travelled and worked through the most humble vocations. His days as a footpath artist are recalled with reverence. His first show in London occurred in 1978. Almost three decades later, in 2007, Sohail’s art arrived at Bonham’s. His last show was held at ArtChowk in 2010. He continues to work at his studio — preparing the next body of work for Full Circle this year. His hands tremble when not in use. He considers himself the last of a generation of libertine painters in Pakistan.
IV
A satirist before he came to art, he speaks of his “heated” fictions. There are too the rude pictures. He draws in jest, paints on commission, proliferates the same, the same. He despises forgery. At the heart of the matter lies the sobriety of Sohail’s gaze. His fabled creatures may be addressed once again. One may begin to outline erotics of his art. With this unusual figure, one may begin to pry a necessary history of erotic art in Pakistan. As Garcia Marquez writes in his last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores: “Morality too is a matter of time.”
V
The construction of the work remains constant. Here too, the framing landscape is foreshortened. It is inhibited, lifted, flattened out. Only the rendered characters possess narrative depth. On the extreme right of this small painting, a female centaur stands in awkward liaison with an inanimate phallic form. Clarity is hindered by rapidly applied colour. We view, instead, knife smear, frottage, in earth browns, blues, hints of green, as though at once a psychic emergence and a segregation were being described.
The scene of sequestered sexuality is shared by master witness, a slightly bloodied pigeon. Its steady gaze commands the painting. This, whilst loosely coloured flowers adorn the soft distance between. The rest of the image works at disarray — and it resists “interpretation”. Sensual dis-order may perhaps only be felt, even as the painting’s strange Edenic beauty covets the viewer’s attention. For no one is permitted speech, in this or any of Sohail’s canvases. His universe is marked by implicit inner presence. It is always a communal space, enclosed and unutterable, and occasionally humoured.
VI
Sourced in daastans and western myth, Sohail’s canvases queerly proclaim erogenous polemic. The best of his work is either imbued with a feminine quality or is complexly engaged with it. Relief seems to occur in the naivete of his rendering and, counter-intuitively, in the retention of opaque interior life. One may read into this gesture a visible and located cultural history. In the moment however, through his pictorial energies we may return to an older art historic sentiment. Erotic form remains, to date, one of the most powerful ways in which art communicates with its audience.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 3rd, 2012.
Not everyone is a cool-eyed customer, come in to view Art. Once a woman will walk in, devastated by love. She seeks nothing from the gallery but imaginable refuge. And she finds herself surrounded — by a drift of coloured fish, or a cream-coloured horse slipping its own outline, veined and pouring mountains, or a naked woman, her body turned exquisitely away. The viewer eases her sense of the real. Here lies a bestiary, and a dwelling place. The gallery space is transformative.
II
The artist’s studio is a cell, enamoured by a large easel and bereft of natural light. Turpentine, linseed oil, an unnamed bottle line the roughshod table. Used tubes of oil paint cover its surface. A neon work lies drying. The palette knife is 45 years old. It carries his motions. Women, garish, frontal, naive, surfeit the studio walls. All from live models, or from the longing of them, indicates the artist. He sits amidst dust, speaking profanity, smiling sweetly, discussing Picasso’s line. After a life of work, there is little to hide. “They are everything.” They are mothers, daughters, mermaids, prostitutes, patrons.
III
At the age of 82, he has seen much world. From Jalandhar to Lahore, London, Karachi, Tassaduq Sohail has travelled and worked through the most humble vocations. His days as a footpath artist are recalled with reverence. His first show in London occurred in 1978. Almost three decades later, in 2007, Sohail’s art arrived at Bonham’s. His last show was held at ArtChowk in 2010. He continues to work at his studio — preparing the next body of work for Full Circle this year. His hands tremble when not in use. He considers himself the last of a generation of libertine painters in Pakistan.
IV
A satirist before he came to art, he speaks of his “heated” fictions. There are too the rude pictures. He draws in jest, paints on commission, proliferates the same, the same. He despises forgery. At the heart of the matter lies the sobriety of Sohail’s gaze. His fabled creatures may be addressed once again. One may begin to outline erotics of his art. With this unusual figure, one may begin to pry a necessary history of erotic art in Pakistan. As Garcia Marquez writes in his last novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores: “Morality too is a matter of time.”
V
The construction of the work remains constant. Here too, the framing landscape is foreshortened. It is inhibited, lifted, flattened out. Only the rendered characters possess narrative depth. On the extreme right of this small painting, a female centaur stands in awkward liaison with an inanimate phallic form. Clarity is hindered by rapidly applied colour. We view, instead, knife smear, frottage, in earth browns, blues, hints of green, as though at once a psychic emergence and a segregation were being described.
The scene of sequestered sexuality is shared by master witness, a slightly bloodied pigeon. Its steady gaze commands the painting. This, whilst loosely coloured flowers adorn the soft distance between. The rest of the image works at disarray — and it resists “interpretation”. Sensual dis-order may perhaps only be felt, even as the painting’s strange Edenic beauty covets the viewer’s attention. For no one is permitted speech, in this or any of Sohail’s canvases. His universe is marked by implicit inner presence. It is always a communal space, enclosed and unutterable, and occasionally humoured.
VI
Sourced in daastans and western myth, Sohail’s canvases queerly proclaim erogenous polemic. The best of his work is either imbued with a feminine quality or is complexly engaged with it. Relief seems to occur in the naivete of his rendering and, counter-intuitively, in the retention of opaque interior life. One may read into this gesture a visible and located cultural history. In the moment however, through his pictorial energies we may return to an older art historic sentiment. Erotic form remains, to date, one of the most powerful ways in which art communicates with its audience.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 3rd, 2012.