ISLAMABAD: The Khaas Gallery inaugurated its first show of the season with Lahore-based artist Komail Aijazuddin’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. Titled ‘Grace in Hand’, the new collection of paintings and drawings is loosely based on the idea of contemporary medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Aijazuddin is a visual artist and writer whose work has been exhibited widely in Pakistan and abroad. His work, while constantly evolving, remains true to his preoccupation with religion, faith and the manifestations of the two.

Poonam Javed called the work lovely, and said that, “The artist has a way of saying what he wants and some of his pieces make very strong statements”. Speaking of one of Aijazuddin’s earlier pieces – ‘Ascension (Falling)’, a dramatic red oil painting featuring copious amounts of gold leaf on canvas – she added, “I’m drawn to this piece because it has great impact, and makes me think of eternity and the flow of life”.

Aijazuddin identified the change in his work as one of scale. He called the collection “quiet work”, a sentiment echoed by some of the exhibition’s visitors.

Sherry Rahman, whose art collection is both eclectic and vast, said: “I am loving the work – it is very sophisticated. The paintings are detailed and compelling. Where the older works are like gouache paintings, the new ones clearly have multiple layers that require engagement. It is a mark of good art when one wants to engage with it and is transformed by it.”

Aijazuddin’s past work has been an exploration of divinity, religious iconography and human frailty. His current drawings were inspired by illuminated manuscripts – handwritten works of art that were the precursors to printed books. Each manuscript was illuminated using gold or silver leaf, and contained motifs, illustrations, and initials beyond the core text and intricate borders.

Interestingly, Aijazuddin deconstructed each drawing, or “wax formation”, by creating multiple images on sheets of translucent wax paper and melding them together to create the final piece.

“I would often start with letting chance dictate how ink or paint would form an abstracted shape, unencumbered by intention. Using whatever resulted as the base I would then create another layer, and another and another, often not establishing a relationship between them until nearer the end of the process,” he explained.

Within a single wax formation, motifs drawn from various traditions and cultures can be seen. One piece contained turbaned men in a garden, clearly Persian or Sikh in origin, a man in a top hat, and a Chinese dragon, all melded together.

The works were largely monochromatic, although there were particularly dramatic black and gold pieces as well. The tones were subdued and required the viewer to pay attention to the intricacy of the formation in order to understand the pieces.

A frequent motif was the ‘Hand of Fatima’, a universal symbol that appeared in various forms. Aijazuddin said: “I’ve long experimented with [it] in my work as not only a stand-in for devotion and divinity but also as a formal element in mark making. It is repeated, dispersed, clustered, made into forms of trees, thorns and halos; it is gridded, hidden revealed; floating, falling, ethereal, both hollow and substantive.”

Alia Bilgrami said: “This current exhibition has taken an interesting turn from his previous work. He has experimented with abstraction and returned to drawing. This collection aesthetically reminds one of miniatures, as Komail has worked within defined borders and used gold leaf and flat colours.”

Published in Dawn, September 16th, 2015

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