Laughter of Idiocy at The Drawing Studio

Laughter of Idiocy bears social and political comment on the unrest and unease found in the society.

LAHORE: One-day preview of Laughter of Idiocy, the new body of work by Muhammad Ashraf, was held at The Drawing Studio on Saturday.

Ashraf’s current body of work bears social and political comment on the unrest and unease found in the society.

Muhammad Ashraf said that his subjects are ‘ordinary’. “They depict everyday life. The show comprises work produced between 2003 and 2010. The thread which holds these works together is the process, which I wanted to share with people. It is a visual phenomenon that cannot be expressed in words,” he explained.

Muhammad Ashraf has an MA in Fine Arts from the University of East London and a BFA from The National College of Arts. He has held many exhibitions in UK and Pakistan.

Art curator and critic Aasim Akhter said about Ashraf’s work, “Ashraf operates in a broad range of styles, supported by intense technical skill and a notion of art which finds the reasons for its existence within itself. These reasons include the pleasure of a painting finally withdrawn from the tyranny of novelty and thus capable of using various manners to achieve the image.”

He said that Ashraf has worked on a chain of assonances, visual analogies that free the image from any need for reference. “This creates a new contemplative state and a sort of quietude. The image is removed from its traditional frame of reference and repositioned in a different direction, imbued with an oriental discipline to be encountered in the void surrounding the figures hanging in space in the painting,” he said.

Akhter explained that artist evokes a ‘very charged up’ world. “The marks can be made with charcoal, inks or acrylics on paper or on canvas. In a number of works, a piece of torn paper, itself marked, has been attached to the larger paper.

The fluidity of Ashraf’s vocabulary and the fact that the lines never stop being lines, even as they become images, signs and symbols is comparable to how we think of the Chinese ideograms,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 19^th, 2010.