You cannot always paint your dreams or dream about your paintings like a certain Dutch master. On occasions what you paint becomes someone else’s dream. That someone else can be a viewer, an onlooker, a curator of an art space or someone doing a menial job at a gallery. However, for that to happen the painting itself has to have enough magnetism or pull in it that it evades no one’s eye. You don’t know whether Tassaduq Sohail falls into that category; what you do know is that an exhibition of his new works at Art Chowk Gallery, Karachi, had, more or less, a similar impact.

The first piece on display was ‘Blue lady’ (oil-on-canvas). This lady is special, as are all ladies in all painters’ lives, oh sorry, art. The elliptical big eyes and reasonably full orangey lips are two facial features which don’t let you look at the whole painting at once. They’re looking back at you, even the lips, and you don’t know why. Sohail is communicating something with this lady, which perhaps even he doesn’t know what it is.

The fourth exhibit is ‘Woman in a blue coat’ (oil-on-canvas). Again, what’s with the colour blue? And the blue eyes! They’re downright beautiful and disturbing at the same time. In the first glance it may look like the picture of a deranged woman. Perhaps it is made that way to deliberately make the viewer veer off the comprehension track. There’s an element of mystery, if not mystique, to it in a classic Sohail way.

If you’ve skipped a couple of exhibits, go back to look at the second piece in the exhibition, ‘The pink nude’ (oil-on-canvas). It’s a stunning work of art and provides a complete disconnect between the ladies with ‘blue’ written (read: painted) all over them. The contours of the subject are so well drawn, that it just doesn’t make sense. It’s not supposed to make sense. Sohail’s art is all about sensibility, not sense. His distorted forms say it all.

Now the seventh painting is titled ‘Mermaid playing with baby fishes’ (oil-on-canvas). It again has blue water and some blue fish in it. The mermaid’s face is readily identifiable.

Sohail gives it away in ‘Fantasy island’ (oil-on-canvas). Or does he? It’s a remarkable work of imagination which is, again using a binary, dream-like and nightmarish. Here the artist summons all the characters in a riot of colour, including blue.

Then to make you think, nay feel, otherwise, through ‘Melancholy’ (oil-on-canvas) he forces you to look into the sad, sad eyes of a girl whose upper half of the body is commensurate with the ocular sadness.

Yes, that’s the kind of realm of reverie that the exhibition transported you to.