Muzzumil Ruheel’s recent show at Canvas Gallery is an affirmation that, despite an abundance of rehashed works in the art market, there is still art that can pull you towards a place of quiet contemplation sans pretence.

Ruheel has sustained a fine balance and focus for over a decade, elaborating and conversing with the language of line and form that he has retrieved from colloquial Urdu language.

The artist charts the mechanics of painting, such as divisions of space, the connections of line to the flatness of solid colour fields, and the critical balance of the circle, the square and the rectangle within the picture frame. Form unfolds gradually, starting from an early training in khattaati or calligraphy, referencing the Nastaliq and Tuluth scripts.

It is as if the script has unfolded itself, aloud in the early works and gently receding into an illegible form later on. Somewhere along his investigation, Ruheel’s script transforms into an idea. If there is a startling revelation, it is this: an idea needs time to speak its language and reveal itself at its own pace.

Muzzumil Ruheel’s latest artworks play with the calligraphic form, abstracting it to depict moments of stillness resulting from unuttered thoughts

The current body of work is aptly titled ‘Speechless’, because Ruheel wants to communicate the idea of being “unable to speak, especially as a result of a strong emotion or shock.” Ruheel is fascinated by the moments between speech or just as one is about to speak. Those unuttered thoughts or moments of stillness have a subtle presence in his work, as beautiful sculptural forms.

In the work Reflections, text is part of an abstract landscape. The division of a predominantly red frame into two parts suggests that the horizon line and the text in black ink appear to be the land or the sea, whereas the sky is marked with irregular horizontal lines in black against a burning red.

These are not only connotations of the land and sky but a conversation between two moments, one in which the writing is dense and forms a layering of the Nastaliq script, alongside a minimal note marked by straight lines of different lengths.

The art of Ruheel celebrates duality. At first, the beautiful Nastaliq looks like a series of English swear words, deceiving the viewer into believing the calligraphic text to be an old manuscript. The words subsequently become illegible and the script is devoid of ‘meaning’ in the conventional sense.

One can see a resemblance to the work of the senior printmaker Afshar Malik and his use of a similar script as puns. The question at that time, or even now, would be whether or not script can be devoid of the cultural histories it embodies. What has been the ‘meaning’ attached to it by Ruheel, and in what form does it continue to surface as a constant in his work? What is the nature of disruption, and how does the artist’s form hold the balance?

Ruheel’s vistas embody a slow movement, perhaps even a photographic moment caught by the camera. There is a dominating sense of balance and design, marked by smaller divisions that present a Paul Klee type of whimsical sensibility.

The depiction of the linear varies from tightly controlled horizontal divisions, such as in the work Unspoken Beauty, which is reminiscent of a flat landscape. In this artwork, the graceful line is like a sound that is suspended in vacuum. The conversation constantly shifts between the script that is ‘written’ by the khattaat or calligrapher, to a field drenched in colour, that is flat, vast and all-encompassing.

The balance between the flat and the sculptural is vivid in the work Equitable. The viewer is drawn into the theatrics of this crisp sculptural form, to participate in rescuing the critical balance of the circle.

There are such moments of epiphany throughout the show that relate to the diverse connotations of speech and thought in Ruheel’s newest series of paintings.

‘Speechless’ was on display at Canvas Gallery in Karachi from January 9-18, 2024

The writer is an independent art critic, researcher and curator based in Karachi

Published in Dawn, EOS, January 28th, 2024