At Taseer Art Gallery in Lahore, artist Ayaz Jokhio presents charcoal black and white drawings. Hailing from Sindh, the artist is well-known to audiences in Pakistan and beyond. Over the years, his diverse body of work has challenged ideas of art through the use of various materials including dust and multifaceted concepts like museum practices.

The exhibition titled “Filling Greys” include seven drawings that bring together two different images — one seemingly illustrating the other. Simply enough in ‘Chhatri’, an umbrella serves the outline for a depiction of a flood that can be seen when viewed closely. A pair of reading glasses is the framework for a representation of a newspaper with blurry text in ‘Ainak’. And ‘Kakar’ shows a cloud and drops of rain that enclose a desert scene.

The works have a childlike quality in how they are drawn. The umbrella, for example, is offered as a sketchy outline, one that does not provide the details found in a more sophisticated drawing. The appearance of a cloud with raindrops is often to be found in a child’s picture. It is an eternal and universal image.

Ayaz Jokhio’s drawings bring together two different images — one seemingly illustrating the other

The pairing of imagery also has a childish simplicity to it. Glasses are needed to bring words into focus, while a contradictory image puts together an area that lacks water with drops of precipitation. On closer inspection, the drawings do have details and explore more serious subject matter.

Chhatri.

On one level, the work seems to be an exploration in contradictions — sometimes formal, sometimes conceptual — between children and adults. Extended to another level, this body of work offers a lesson in the making of art or, more specifically, in the production of images. What the artist creates is different types of pictures — one is cruder and easier to detect as something drawn while the other, detailed rendering is more photographic and realistic. Yet both depictions are just that.

These are representations of things and events — not the actual thing. Recalling the work of Rene Magritte, Jokhio offers the audience a lesson in how to understand art. Magritte challenged viewers by telling them that the pipe he painted was not a pipe. And, in fact, it was not, it was a painting of a pipe. Many others have explored and challenged the idea of what is art and the role of the artist.

Today, Jokhio investigates these concepts and questions in a variety of approaches. In “Filling Greys” there is one representation followed by a second depiction. What results is a visual metonym, wherein one image stands in for another. A metonym is different from, though related, to the idea of the metaphor. In both, there is a comparison made between two things; however, in metonyms, one phrase, or in this case an image, is described by something that is closely related to it. The reading glasses tell us about a world of blurred words, or vice versa.

So what we find in the series of drawings in which two pictures come together is an investigation of the act of making art. Artists illustrate life; yet it is not in order to replicate the world. Instead, it is about offering imagery that allows us to formulate our own thoughts about life.

Perhaps children are able to tune into this way of appreciating and representing the world as they make their simplified images to stand for the complexity of life. The artist captures this spirit to investigate the production of pictures and thus to somehow comprehend the world that he has depicted.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, December 14th, 2014