KARACHI: An exhibition of Shireen Kamran’s latest body of work that’s under way at the Canvas Art Gallery is a reminder to art lovers how delightfully effective abstraction can be in evoking the gamut of emotions despite being a genre that shies away from realism and its straight messaging.

The wonders of abstraction are two-fold: one, it pits the tangible against the intangible in a way that both the concrete and the imaginary appear to be two sides of the same coin; two, it pushes, in a non-coercive manner, the viewer to use their imagination to the hilt.

Shireen is aware of that. She also knows the power and reach of colours and shapes. In her statement she gives away her intention behind the show: “Energetic, vigorous and drifting lines infused with incessant mark-making along with alchemy of shapes and colours bring the paintings to life. Bordering on the historical and the contemporary, these works invoke the ancestral memory of life and the archaic forms of existence, thereby inviting the viewer to think beyond meaning.”

That is some statement, and indicates how deeply entrenched the artist is in her practice. The phrase ‘to think beyond meaning’ is, ironically, meaningful: it means whoever looks at her paintings should first cut through the abstraction and then deconstruct what they initially thought the artworks were about. Fascinating.

All of this begins with the piece called ‘The Song of Being and Non-Being’ (pigments, acrylic on canvas). Now notice that Shireen is ostensibly hinting at the existential, somewhat Sartrean, aspect of life, where the inherent meaninglessness of the world perturbs philosophers and thinkers. But doing it in the form of a ‘song’ takes the concept to a different tangent, making it both palatable and understandable. Of course, as the artists emphasise, this palatability contains the historical and the contemporary together, sometimes as colours crossing each other’s paths, and sometimes in shapes and lines that coexist harmoniously with the colours. Therefore what the viewer sees beyond meaning becomes all the more profound.

The exhibition concludes on March 7.

Published in Dawn, March 7th, 2019