There was a very unique, exciting and eloquent art exhibition titled “High Five” at the Ocean Art Gallery, Lahore recently which brought into focus the rich and contemporary colour palette to celebrate the seductive beauty, dream-like isolation, festive activity and an inevitable clash of the material with the spiritual. A.S. Rind, A.Q. Arif, Mashkoor Raza, Moazzam Ali and Salman Farooqi were the participants of the show.

It was very interesting to observe every artist’s unique and superb form of expression, their images and impressions infused in daring daubs and how skillfully they played with the strong contrast of light and dark.

Enjoying the legacy of Mughal architecture; the exuberant and surreal landscapes of Arif have the power to induce déjà vu. Through his flight of imagination he reveals his ability to take the viewer to the exact ‘location’ and play the tune of tranquility and spiritual pleasure. He mostly enjoys the luminous shades of blue, cyan, ochre, green and orange while painting domes, jharokas, palaces and mosques.

His closeness to Mughal art is evident from the fact that he gives special attention to the minutest detail of the typical motifs used in the architectural settings (jharokas, frescoes, engravings on the wall) miniature paintings, carpets, costumes and jewellery designs and he applies the same in his canvasses, making the composition more appealing and contemporary.

A show that celebrates beauty and the lighter side of life

Rind conveys his language of feelings through lively figurative compositions and used acrylic on canvas in wash technique. He explains, “If you conclude any meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be true but it’s not my idea to give that meaning to my work. I create art for art’s sake.” As with many painters he picks to celebrate beauty in the form of his ‘trademark’ representation of dreamy eyed, long necked, flute-playing, ideal-figured women. His subject matter reveals his inspiration with the cultural and poetical legacy of the Rajasthan Desert.

Ali also shares the same subject matter of imaginative world of beautiful choli and ghagra clad women of deserts. The medium that he used is watercolour on paper.

Raza with his non-representational, abstract-Impressionist style plays with the images of powerful and energetic horses, taking inspiration for some of his pieces from Picasso’s ‘Guernica’. Although we cannot give the same meaning to the subject matter but the application of daring daubs and somewhere the drawing of the side pose of the animal looked the same. Some of the canvasses reveal the artist’s ‘deliberate’ effort to master the art of ‘exact’ and ‘definite’ line on to the non-representational images of the animal. With his controlled play of light and dark and glowing colours he also paints nudes.

The “cubic-style” landscapes of Salman Farooqi also bring colours to the show. His architectural setting does not represent human presence but it can be felt literally with the images of ‘washed clothes’ hung outside on the terrace or the lighting inside the closed windows (at night). A very calm yet mysterious element of imagination prevails in his work. He applies very thin layers of exuberant and quite contemporary colours.

The overall impact of the display was to celebrate the beauty and the lighter side of life, which surely was a success of artists who through their imagination were able to create this mood of gaiety, playfulness and romance, which is necessary for the viewers in this age of restlessness and violence.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, November 9th, 2014