The show at Koel Gallery opens on Thursday, 19 January 2017. There are eighteen paintings in acrylic (in the Fabulist style) selected over the period June 2015 - December 2016. There is another follow-up show at Koel Gallery of oil paintings in November 2017 during the Karachi Biennale.
Shortest winter day with the sun bright and stretched out halfway across the floor of the room. The warmest day of winter. Why am I not able to write? He is not a friend, this artist whose work I admire and take pains to seek out every so often. He may be among the few formal painters left of our times. Is it his solitude that weighs on me or the authority of the art historian’s voice that silences me? Do I want to grow into Akbar Naqvi? Or, conversely, is it the concern of advertising his work before an erudite aficionado that brings on this diffidence?
His paintings look at me as I move around them and demand a conversation. Not paintings, to be exact, but photographs thereof, so a very poor relative. They are not windows I can enter or exit from but a flat, pictorial surface smoothed with great care for the dance of colour without form, a painting without shadow but only in hues. The construction of a line in luminescent dots gives energy, movement, direction; the line meanders, is never straight or static, and does not trap you in completed images. What is he celebrating?
Take his ‘Self Portrait’ where primary yellow has been used to great effect, built in thin valences to the patina of rust, the yellow flames where the brain should have been seem like a self-crowning of sorts. Perhaps all paintings are portraits and all men are kings when they tell their own story. Shafi here gives a nod to a square-jawed figure with a sucker for a mouth and one glazed eye, while the dots embellish and exalt the head-like form.
'Urdu Poetry' (in the Fabulist Style) - 24 x 20 inches - Acrylic on board, 2016
When he is not making his large monochromes, the smaller opalescent surfaces are far more talkative, childlike scrawls that look like lords and ladies
Or, ‘Periwigged figures, Colonial Drift 2’, is perhaps the most open metaphor of the game of love with the portrait of a lordly man and a woman kissing in elaborate coiffeurs, the man’s heart where his mouth should have been. Their flat forms intermingle in a confused and incandescent mesh of energetic dots, ridiculous in the comedy of historical love.
Bhakti yogis believed you should not look too often into a mirror - and to look with compassion when you did - because what you saw transformed you. They also held that if you looked in and saw your own image then you were probably incapable of loving anyone. What you did not look at, perished. In all cases, there is a long oral tradition of the gaze being considered magical and transformative.
A third piece of work titled ‘In the Court of the Romantic’ appears almost like a delicate chiaroscuro in texture strokes: erotic mark making built around layers of white to create a filigree in lace, in knitting and in fabric print, the decorative paraphernalia that generally signifies the feminine. May the femme in everyone not be incensed by this!
'In the Court of the Romantic' (in the Fabulist Style) - 15 x 15 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2016
When he is not making his large monochromes, the smaller opalescent surfaces are far more talkative, childlike scrawls that look like figures dressed up in mama’s sari as lords and ladies, in high heels. Stippled in golden dots like tilla work that brings them close to the decoration of tribals and ethnics: they rebound the Hindu bindi, the polka dot Bengali sari, Uzbek face markings, Moroccan tapestry and/or the wall paintings of aboriginal dreamtime art. Shafi denies any such intentionality of developing a “universal ethnic” and says he was thinking rather of Goya’s distortions of his subject.
Despite their clever names and artistic subterfuge, these could be cave paintings; resplendent, secretive. An alchemical play of stone and water (oil suspensions for Shafi) smeared over a canvas buttered in gesso, the painter does not always know how he will create marks and leaven memories. The paintings explore the gestures of the brush, the resistance of pigment, the movement and insistence of an incomplete form. Only a child, a madman or a mystic can renounce meaning in this manner.
'Periwigged Figures, Colonial Drift No.2' (in the Fabulist Style) - 22 x 22 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2016
Despite their clever names and artistic subterfuge, these could be cave paintings; resplendent, secretive
Still, our times are choked with meaning and the artist has to explore further reductions and emptying. The work that most clearly shows he is leaving known shores is maybe, ‘Head: 2016’. Here the flatness that was god has become a speckled background in layers of effervescent memories. Flatness has moved outward, become skeletal. The strokes move more freely than he allows them to otherwise. Some areas look smudged, which is curiously comforting - a gradual shift away from the aristocratic flourish of his monochromes.
Shafi’s smaller stippled work is something he has been toying with since long. What is it about them that troubles me so? Is it perhaps the humour which can so easily be assimilated in the meretricious and the mercantile? Playfulness can then seem stylised and insouciance can become tedious. In Shafi, humour may be a deliberate miscommunication, a deferral of meaning, maybe even a rest from his solemn monochromes.
More important than asking about the genealogy of influences over his work is where he thinks he is going with it. Is he concerned with the new in his work? I write and ask him. He responds thoughtfully:
“Sometimes one consciously changes technique that leads to a substantially different image or new subject matter. Often the conscious idea to alter technique happens while working and sketching. Personally speaking, I am acutely aware when these subtle accelerations occur in my work.”
'Self Portrait' (in the Fabulist Style) - 15 x 15 inches, Acrylic on canvas, 2015
I have maundered around the work long enough and feel it is now folding into itself, closing the dialogue that has been dismissed for a failure. I relapse into hearing other voices speak to me...Ahmed Parvez for his disturbed colour planes, Ahmed Zoay for the energy of his strokes, earlier painters across the divide like KG Subramanyam, FN Souza, even Tyeb Mehta who experimented with the Indian imaginary and sense of colour. Shafi denies that his work has South Asian context - or any context for that matter, because all contexts and identities are ephemeral - but he is happy to belong to a family of echoes.
The shadows outside the window have lengthened. The breeze has picked up. I decide not to write, after all. Maybe paintings should just be. They are so rare nowadays, touched by the ardour of an artist’s hand, turned in his smithy on slow fire for days, solitary conversations shared. Paintings like Shafi’s should be left alone to grow gardens in our eyes.
