Painting exhibition: Artist takes viewers to the countryside, city centres

Zulfiqar Ali Zulfi displays work at Tanzara gallery

ISLAMABAD: An exhibition of paintings by landscape artist Zulfiqar Ali Zulfi went on display at the Tanzara Art Gallery on Friday.

The exhibition comprises 34 landscape and cityscape paintings from Lahore and its outskirts, especially the artist’s native village DG Khan where he grew up.

“Zulfi’s imagery is idyllic and delightful — he is a master of capturing seasons and times of day. In his landscapes, one can truly feel the breeze and smell the grass. The foggy winter morning scenes are cold and the sunny landscapes warm and brilliant,” said Noshi Qadir, the curator of the gallery.

Zulfi, who is a realist painter, depicts both landscapes and cityscapes in rich detail, with command over the interplay of light and shadow which creates an element of luminosity in his art pieces.

He experimented with mist three years ago and was fascinated by its romance. He captures the essence of gentle wind, light pouring through mist, and at times playing with the burnt-orange winter sun with his brush. His skies are reflective of changing time and seasons. At times, it is all misty while on other canvases, it is festooned with colours subtly merging into each other. This assimilation announces the time element, depicting dawn or dusk.

Vast mustard and hay fields are other interesting landscapes, which draw the viewer in for their surrealistic feel. The imagery of nature at its raw takes the viewer back in time, away into serene countryside. He focuses on the sun-kissed landscapes or the gentle beams thrown off by an illuminated lamp in a darkened, narrow street of a traditional, old bazaar.

He has the power of capturing the essence of a place and replicating it on canvas. Beyond realism, he understands his subject matter well — be it a rustic scene, or an urban setting, misty horizons, or cattle out in the open fields, the artist renders such images with skilled dexterity.

“Zulfi is a prominent name among the art community of Pakistan. He is a wonderful landscape artist and he has started a new trend in landscape in a sense that it’s not a realistic landscape and it’s almost realistic,” Asif Shah, a retired bureaucrat who bought one of the artist’s paintings at the exhibition.

He added that there is something ethereal about Zulfi’s landscapes and one can see through the landscape and feel the water or tree and yet it looks almost unreal and that is the beauty of the

Published in The Express Tribune, February 7^th, 2015.