Hanif Shahzad is arguably one of the most prolific artists in Pakistan, now that some of the others have pegged down from natural causes. His journey of discovery started in 1986, when he bagged first prize in a competition at the Karachi School of Art. After that he never looked back, coming up with a major exhibition almost every year.
If it wasn’t a solo effort, it was participation in a group exhibition. Be it in Taipei, Seoul, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Birmingham, Beirut or Berlin, he gave it his best shot and jolly well tried to ensure that his was the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree.
His paintings adorn the walls of quite a few collectors, and the offices of a number of private corporations. They can also be seen in unlikely places like the Sindh governor’s house, the ministry of foreign affairs and army headquarters in Islamabad.
The very first time I attended an exhibition by this enterprising painter was in 1991. I was struck by the fresh informality and directness of his art. He had presented a cheerful collection of collages executed in the representational style. Tiny bits of paper in graded hues had been stuck on the canvas. The surface textures were quite intriguing and the overall effect of the mosaics was generally pleasing.
However, in a note published at the time I stated that while he was able to portray a material solidity of figure, surface and space through what the photographer would have referred to as ‘accidental spontaneity,’ he was not able to achieve a proper sense of perspective, as the subject was always plunked dead centre in the frame, disturbing the spatial harmony.
In his next exhibition in which he had overcome the perception problem, he made numerous forays into the rich historical hinterland of the country, drenched by dark references of a bygone era, and into the distant past, to the very roots of our civilisation.
And then there was that exhibition at the Clifton Art Gallery in 2001 when critics and collectors sat up and took notice. In 20 large canvases Shahzad provided a visual allegory for his contemporaries to ponder. He painted everyday scenes from Karachi life — not as one would have liked to see them, but as they actually were. There were fretted structures of earlier generations, buildings with their shingle tortured mansards, red-brick minarets of hulking old houses, solid turn-of-the-century structures in magnificent red sandstone, and workshops with stingy and sooty windows. There were wooden tenements coloured like mud, toppled bill boards dipping down into chaotic traffic and the odd donkey, a picture of somnolent and dejected resignation.
Shahzad started off as a watercolour colour artist, and stuck to watercolours for some considerable period. Then, all of a sudden, he switched to oils and clung to this medium for eight years. However, whatever the media he experimented in, he remained a realist painter and stuck to the straight and narrow, eschewing the modern stuff for solid traditionalism. His favourite foreign artist is William Turner, and on the local scene he greatly admires the work of the late Gulgee.
And now, a year after his last exhibition, he surfaced once again a couple of weeks ago at the Citiart Gallery But this time he had made a radical departure from the past, both in style and subject matter. ‘Rich tones’, the title he gave to his latest exhibition, consisted of 41 watercolours, and they were all abstract compositions — something that he had never done before. The tones were certainly rich, though I couldn’t help getting the feeling that the greens didn’t blend quite as well as the blues.
When I asked Shahzad how many canvases he had destroyed before he made his final selection, he said he had spoilt at least 150 pictures. Watercolours permit few, if any, mistakes, and the medium should be avoided if the artist lacks confidence and directness. But Shahzad has a reservoir of confidence and perseveres and fully exploits all the qualities inherent in the medium, not least its transparency, its saturated colours and potential for spontaneous handling. He derives immense pleasure from what he describes as “controlling the intensity in watercolours.”
Non-figurative watercolours are scarcely new. I am, of course, thinking of the pioneer of abstraction Wasily Kandinsky, whose geometric compositions done in watercolours in the 1920s surely are the best things he ever did; or his friend Paul Klee whose influence on later artists has largely been anything but benign.
Saturated transparent colours can be achieved on a large scale and in the much more modest format favoured by most watercolourists, Shahzad included. The only danger in a series of abstractions is that the pictures often tend to succeed one another with a dull predictability, and in the cosy repetition there is often an absence of surprises.
In Shahzad’s case there were a few surprises, and pleasant ones to boot, and the way the colours blended was marvellously involving. One just wonders what he will come up with next year!
{Source: Dawn}
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