Three well-known artists - R.M. Naeem, Abdul Jabbar Gull and Mehr Afroz - are struggling to reconcile their country's gruesome present with spiritual ideals. Review by Noor Jehan Mecklai
R.M. Naeem graduated with distinction from the National College of Arts in Lahore and subsequently held the position of assistant professor there. He has held 19 solo shows, participated in group exhibitions around the world, and won the National Award of Excellence in 2003. His latest work displays a remarkable understanding of line, shape and chiaroscuro.
Chiaroscuro – an Italian word, meaning contrast between light and dark – was made famous by such masters as Caravaggio, Corregio and Rembrandt. Caravaggio made it the cornerstone of his work; but whereas he has been described as heavy-handed in this respect, no such accusation can be leveled at Naeem, who uses a gentler approach and subtle layers of paint that are somehow reminiscent of genuine black-and-white photography.
Nowhere IV
In a recent series titled ‘Nowhere’, we see an adolescent boy floating in a mysterious and deathly realm. In this picture a rim lights part of his head; his fixed gaze and the darkness around him suggest burial or drift from reality. In ‘Nowhere IV’, this same boy floats as if about to enter another state of being. (Here again we see Naeem’s classical preference for line over colour.) The halo around the boy’s head indicates that the subject is inexorably bound for another realm. This picture also brings to mind Pierre, the hero of Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’, and the symbolic death he must undergo in order to be initiated into a secret brotherhood.
‘Nowhere III’ has a dismembered male head floating above the River of Life, which has turned to stone beneath him. The head represents a life or philosophy tossed about willy-nilly by the winds of change; it speaks of social unrest. The texture of the piece could be interpreted as representing the mitti or earth from which the first man was made. How far we have come from the innocence of those days, Naeem seems to say, with our severed heads surrounded by strange glows.
Like Naeem, Abdul Jabbar Gull has attended a number of residencies abroad, exhibited in many countries and received numerous awards. But he is known as a sculptor. His recent work is concerned with the choice between materialism and spiritual knowledge.
Gull started his career as a painter of cinema and commercial hoardings, later entering the National College of Arts in Lahore. At first he studied design and advertising, but later decided that his heart was in sculpture.
[quote]The dismembered head in Naeem's work speaks of social unrest[/quote]
Sensitivity, a deep personal involvement with his subject and the search for spirituality are apparent in Gull’s latest works. Two of his pieces bear the title ‘Game’ and include remarkable arrangements of many-armed pegs fashioned from walnut and rosewood, rising from the base on freely arranged piles of wooden blocks, with flowers and the occasional plate crafted in metal filling the spaces in between. Do these pegs represent human beings moved about by the hand of fate?
Gull’s beautiful wall-based works are long panels sculpted from wood, aluminum and MS, each showing a meditating face. The vertical ‘Self Absorption’ panel displays the meditating face at the bottom, with subtle light reflecting off prominent features – the forehead, the ears, the nose – and flowers rising gradually to the upper area. These flowers represent the blossoming of devotion either on the path to enlightenment or towards the spiritual teacher who leads one on this path. Among the blooms one sees examples of a phenomenon known as xenoglossia, the ability to speak or write in an unknown language, an ability that could not have been acquired by natural means.
Self Absorption - 12x36, Wood, Aluminu and MS - 2014
[quote]Gull seems to suggest that for some people, Paradise equals money[/quote]
Gull’s third panel is titled ‘Paradise’ and shows a cascade of flowers surrounding a meditating face, a coin bearing a face in profile, strangely similar to that of Elizabeth II, and finally an ornate square. Is this square the secret door to Paradise? And does the coin suggest that for some people, Paradise equals money? Interestingly, both the coin and the face above are surrounded by circles of leaves and flowers arranged in such a way as to suggest either the rays of the sun or the light of Paradise.
The revered Meher Afroz is a pioneering printmaker and painter. She obtained a bachelor’s degree from the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Lucknow, India, in 1971 and is currently a senior faculty member at the Indus Valley School of Art in Karachi. Some of her work appears in the UNICEF collection, and she has exhibited regularly in Pakistan and many foreign countries.
The visual language she employs in the current exhibition is certainly pregnant with intangible concerns, displayed behind an appreciable veil of obscurity, since she appears to have abandoned, at least for the time being, the employment of representational logic. She categorizes her work as a palimpsest, a parchment or manuscript on which recent markings have been applied over earlier, erased words, or in her case images.
Main Bhi Haraza Hoon II
[quote]Mehr Afroz speaks of "Behist-i-gumshuda," the loss of paradise on earth[/quote]
Afroz is deeply concerned with the way in which we as a nation and a society have lost touch with certain values and truths. In person she speaks of “Behist-i-Gumshuda,” the loss of paradise on earth, the lack of moral and spiritual direction in a place where so many involved in the current displays of primitive brutality have either forgotten or have never known about the centuries of civilization that have gone before.
In the piece titled ‘Main Bhi Hazara Hoon I’ (acrylic and silver on canvas) she has presented an arresting contrast of silver hands against a black background, above an equally sized silver expanse covered in embossed circles. The silver represents purity, while the Hamsa – the Hand of Fatima – is an image of loyalty, faith and resistance against difficulty. However, the hand in general is a very powerful symbol with many meanings, such as our duty to stand up for what is right and the command to stop. “We are all Hazaras, those gentle, cultured people who are senselessly murdered,” Meher seems to say when we look at the silver circles below. Each one of these contains a number, suggesting a fruitless attempt to calculate the number of Hazaras who have succumbed.
GAME - 27x19x24, wood, Aluminu and MS, 2014
In ‘Main Bhi Hazara Hoon II’, the same materials have been used. This work presents a blue square which bears Meher’s signature in its texture, produced by scratching and embossing the acrylic base. The repetitive, randomly placed bow-and-arrow pattern, again in silver, is a symbol of both righteous decisiveness as well as heartless violence. Its use here takes us back to the battle at Karbala.
As for the term ‘palimpsest’, it applies most obviously to the piece titled ‘Mujhe Ishq Sare Chaman Se Hai II’. Here again we find Afroz working and reworking over acrylic. Concerning her choice of the color blue, she describes it as one of the central colors of Islamic art, “a deep, deep, deep multilayered colour that draws you in, a truly spiritual colour that expresses water, softness, lightness, purification and the journey towards spirituality.”
Significantly, the manqabat in the title of this work expresses love for the whole world but may also be understood to refer to love for the Holy Prophet (PBUH) and his family. “They are the ultimate, the complete human beings who taught us the way,” says Meher Afroz.
All the works discussed here were part of an exhibition called ‘Intangible Concerns’ at Karachi’s Chawkandi Art Gallery
