Questions of Space

When it comes down to it, it’s all about the drawing. Any artist can tell you: that is precisely what separates talent from mere trickery and the gifted from the showmen. Masood Kohari, one of Pakistan’s greats, who works with glass and clay in France, still puts ink to paper in figure-drawing sessions, because that’s what keeps an artist on their toes. It’s why boxers skip rope.

Curated by Maha Malik, a recent show, at Karachi’s respected Chawkandi gallery, called “Markings”, showcases twelve artists’ “contemporary drawings and questions of space”. There are a variety of artistic weapons (if you please) on display here: acrylic, soft graphite, bindi stickers and even lasers to name but a few.

Imran Qureshi combines the spontaneity of splatters with restrained brush strokes in his signature flower explosions

Naiza Khan overlays a city’s terrain with bodied space. In her work, stencil-like precision jostles with primitive markings. Artists like Waseem Ahmed and Aisha Khalid use their lines to guide us, as if to follow their thoughts.

Ahmed, a celebrated miniaturist, plays with the Classical Greek form. Two “Sorrowful Angels” as his title says, flank a splattered road map. Aisha Khalid does a diptych. On one side is her signature tulip, reproduced with clinical precision - not a leaf membrane out of place - and on the other, its unruly sister. She calls it a blind drawing - an urgent, loose rendering. It strangely captures the ethos and vitality of the flower. Aisha herself was surprised at sight of a freer version of a tulip that she has known for fifteen years.

Meher Afroz’s beautiful quest for spiritual truth is here too. The two pieces are deeply worked with graphite, and depict lost values and the distortion of our moral compass. In “Gohar-e-Nayab I and II”, deep markings create a dark ocean from which words sprout: “ishq” (love) and “bay niyazi”, they warn us; and “sabr” (patience), they admonish us.  As always her work is mature and meaningful.

Ali Kazim’s piece stays with me. Like the fine gauze of a grandmother’s skin, his lines are sensitive, the piece whispers. On overlapping Japanese tissue, the surface adds intrigue to the piece. His lines form entrails or vessels, even echoing a roadmap. Accompanying it is a ceramic response. Although it is interesting, the ceramic piece doesn’t quite have the ethereal breathing quality of the drawing.

Khadim Ali would return from the tandoor in Quetta with roti and pockets full of charcoal, leaving a trail of giant drawings on pavements and walls

Imran Qureshi combines the spontaneity of splatters with restrained brush strokes in his signature flower explosions, where paan-like sprays form bursts of foliage and petals. Anwar Saeed’s solitary male forms use a mishmash of techniques. In one, the figure has awkwardly hairy legs, and the surface playfully twinkles with bindi stickers. Mohammad Ali Talpur’s tranquil, orderly surface stood alone on one side of the gallery. It curiously looked like a shop’s shutters, unwelcoming and quiet. That made you want a closer inspection.

Afshar Malik’s pieces look as if they were rendered with an X-ray machine, or as viewed from under a dark sea.  In wire relief print, it is dreamy or nightmarish, depending on your point of view.

Muhammad Zeeshan has a tongue-in-cheek style: earlier in the year his “samjhdar logon ki whiskey” featured naughtily at “The 70’s: The radioactive Decade” show. Here his triptych plays on the power nap. In “Power yawns”, a lion is sandwiched between Obama, and the Dalai Lama - all kings of separate jungles, yawning. Using laser-scoring technology, the three pieces look black and gold, forming a nice inverse on a graphite drawing, on white. The images are painstakingly formed by small patterns.

Khadim Ali’s frightening and beautiful demons live in a fiery golden world and stem from the immortal 16th century Persian epic, the Shahnameh. RM Naeem’s drawings have the proficiency of a Dutch master - taking the form of gentle human renderings in acrylic and paper, with only the faces shaded and detailed.

We all feel compelled to doodle or sketch even if it is far from our callings in life. It could be a sales slump, osmosis or a pie chart. Today in galleries worldwide, art can be splattered on the floor, or wandering through earlobes, not touching your eyeballs at all. It’s nice to see the Chawkandi show celebrate where it all began. At times the connection between the works seems tenuous, despite Maha Malik’s elaborate essays, but the show is still a delight. Anwar Saeed observes that “drawing is an emergency”. Khadim Ali describes it best with a childhood story. His mother would send him off to the tandoor in Quetta to fetch bread. He would return with roti and pockets full of charcoal, leaving a trail of giant drawings on pavements and walls. It’s a journey that every artist has to undertake.

Zehra Hamdani Mirza is a writer and painter based in Karachi