KARACHI, Dec 27: The difficulty with painting intangible things, such as the soul, is that it requires a certain high degree of imaginativeness to make the viewer feel as if the subject has a tactile quality to it. This is where the line between the tangible, the known and the undiscovered and the unknown lose its blurriness and emerges bright as the sun, metaphorically speaking. Good artists know how to achieve that goal.

An exhibition of artworks titled Images of the Soul by the Dubai-based artist Rahat Ismail Qavi commenced at the Grandeur Art Gallery on Thursday. The artist appears to be one of those individuals who prefer imagination to reason and romance to rationale. It is perhaps for this reason that the faces she draws and the figures she paints become merged with the light colours that she employs, making it amply clear to the viewer that body and soul can be treated as one.

In a relatively large oil-on-canvas piece, there are two faces and the rest is shades of the colour blue dominating the canvas. The faces cannot be readily identified yet they maintain their beauty and seem part of the whole colour scheme.

Then in another artwork, the artist shows the bare back of a girl, again using lighter hues, and leaves the back of her head, her hair, as the only object not commensurate with the rest of the scene. And that’s where she wows the viewer. The blackness of the hair of the subject does not look something different from the picture in totality.

Apart from that, landscapes also adorn the gallery’s walls.

The exhibition will be open till Jan 2, 2013.—PS