ISLAMABAD, Oct 9: Nahid Raza is much too much of a woman to be an artist in her entirety. There is a distance that is quite easily discernible between her warm and ingenuous person and her contemplated work that is both studied and cold in a ceramic way. The unadorned red colour with which she fills her abundant spaces does not raise the temperature of her frames.

Her women, nearly all of them two-and-a-half dimensional seem to control the placid even mood. Loquacious like all good ladies ought to be, ready to eat up your brain with mundane detail, Nahid is monologous in her work. Her study of the woman she talks so much about is surprisingly quiet.

At the Nomad Art Gallery where her work goes on display from Thursday, of the 30 paintings, the one entitled The caged bird has a cold sensuality that is exceedingly provocative. It’s the image of a woman that a brother would eye as a beautiful woman. An inner light exudes from her limbs. A halo above her head is reflected in the dirt floor near her feet. She has broken out of the cage which now imprisons the ghost of a bird. The Kiss is an illumination and an unfolding.

Marjorie Husain who thinks Nahid has gone beyond her earliest Chawkundi series and the 80’s Universe sequence and has found herself in essence in the 90’s woman studies, which she likens to an intimate diary, has a valid point there in her sensing a correlation in the artist’s work to the central realities of existence. But the candour that Ms Husain sees in Nahid’s woman series appears to me to be more enigmatic than ‘moving’. For a person so exuberantly earthy as Nahid, it is amazing to find such dramatic economy and restraint in her work.

Going to the Nomad Gallery that professes to strive for social change through art, our lives’ last and least consideration, one is moved by its director, Nageen Hayat’s extraordinary effort to forget her feudal ancestry in positive work for women’s uplift.— Mushir Anwar