In the contemporary world, with its fierce competition and bucketfuls of organic new age anxiety, all kinds of movements are taking place in the world of art where it is increasingly being felt that traditional art has been kept on life support longer than its vital signs warranted. This review is about one of them.

When I heard that the Full Circle Gallery, Karachi, had an exhibition with the enticing title of ‘Under Cover’, I implicitly assumed there would be a clutch of cloak and dagger visuals. The kind of black-and-white movie flashbacks that one saw in the pre-war smoke-filled bars of Saigon, Lisbon and Casablanca, which were infested with spies in white raincoats and felt hats pulled over their eyes that would lurk in the shadows in desperate search of the kind of information that would benefit a benefactor.

Instead, there was this collection of oils and prints and polythene bags by two budding young artists Annem Zaidi and Emaan Mahmud trying to find their place in the sun. It was a pronounced departure from the sort of expositions normally seen these days in the galleries. The circular issued by the gallery described the exhibition as ‘the investigation of different facades, surfaces and textures’. It is an apt description.

The visuals are modestly priced and are full of minute details, and look astonishingly timely in a world where experimentation is the order of the day. Scheherazade Junejo, the curator, is a constant and uncompromising campaigner always in search of new ideas and themes and is alive to changes in the lithe life of visual language.

The images of both artists are laced together into a single theme. Zaidi’s use of light, shade and colour are intimate without being intrusive. One can almost detect a breathless enthusiasm as she introduces the audience to her specialty. Her compositions are pleasing to the eye and glitter with insight. Every frame comes with an exclamation mark. Her obsession with detail is fetching. The way the figures dissolve into darker backgrounds through a kind of chemical osmosis was riveting.

The paintings will most certainly appeal not only to the regular visitor but also to the sophisticated haberdasher (a person who owns or works in a shop that sells small items) in search of seductive advertising — the kind one finds in those glossy American, British and Italian fashion magazines.

Mahmud carries the message to its conclusion in antithetical fashion. Her visuals are like dropped stitches in the tapestry of life. Her ambit is broad and her spectrum wide. Her approach, however, while it is concentrating on detail, is more focused on minutiae. But she experiments with plastic materials, twisting and turning the fragments into recognisable shapes, chronicling changes in the textural patterns.

The shapes that emerge strive towards some kind of imageries which have their own special appeal. Her practice of heating the plastic to attain the desired objective reminds me of the time when I was a kid and we would celebrate New Year’s Eve by melting lead over a fire and pouring the contents into a bowl of water. No two lumps were ever alike and they coalesced into an astonishing variety of paper weights that resembled those clusters of metallic monsters from the science fiction movies. But that was a long time ago when the pace of life was leisurely and deliberate like a slow march. Now it is difficult to keep pace with innovation.