In a chaotic Lahore marked by multiple construction sites, artist Mohammad Ali Talpur's work provides visual and psychological relief. Sana Kazi provides a vivid description of his art
The streets of Lahore are flooded with cement, iron rods and heavy machinery. Local and International media outlets have highlighted concerns over the transportation and infrastructural developments in Lahore. Either this second-largest city of Pakistan will turn out to be one of the most planned and efficient cities in Pakistan or we will witness a sad demise of the cultural and historical value of this city.
The traffic, chaos, dust and noise: all play a part together in wrecking a Lahori’s nerves these days. However amidst all this commotion and the long periods of waiting while stuck in traffic at the Main Boulevard and the Jail Road intersection, there is something surreal and illusionary about a certain isolated structure standing tall right in the centre. It is scaffolding for the Sherpao Bridge at its tip. Never had I before noticed it the way I did that day, on my way back from viewing an exhibition at the Lahore Art Gallery, on the 25th of November 2015. None other than the esteemed Pakistani artist Mohammad Ali Talpur could direct you to think of a construction site in such a way.
Talpur takes abstraction and non-representational art to a whole new level
That long and winding journey from Gulberg to China Chowk, where the Lahore Art Gallery is located, takes the viewer from today’s chaotic Lahore into a white cube: a space where one views black and white images that instantly take you into a state of serenity, peace and calm. That clatter and pandemonium outside the large canvases is completely dispersed, as if immediately barred by a rhythm, a silent music and harmony emanating from the paintings themselves. To put it simply, the visuals were audible.
There is deception in symmetry, of course, especially when you take a particular turn nowadays in Lahore and end up in another place, confused and lost as to where you really are, because the whole city is being redesigned. However, this kind of deception is calculated intelligently by Talpur: his symmetry is hallucinating and brings one into a state of a trance. It has a high of its own, whirling in circles like a dervish. Talpur’s work is the culmination of a study of the South Asian arts that include dance and music. Clearly discernible is the mark-making process and the element of Op art: the lines, dots and dashes all curve in a serpentine manner across the canvas. It is a visual representation of form as an idea.
Talpur's art employs marble slabs
Twenty-seven works of art were on display, with some mesmerizing monotone acrylics on canvas and drawings. One of the major transitions the artist displayed in his solo exhibit happened to be his marble slab works. Linear drawings on white marble were mounted on the walls. Adjacent to these were some rather huge surfaces, where lines painted in contrasting black and white were moulded into myriad shapes and forms. According to Talpur, in his interview for Artnow Pakistan with Dua Abbas Rizvi, the difference between Westen and South Asian art is that “the former visibly divides and displays all its content in a foreground and background whereas the latter employs many more layers: it is much more subtle“.
Mohammad Ali Talpur
Drawing on marble
In this exhibition, Talpur takes abstraction and non-representational art to a whole new level, in the most ground-breaking manner possible for a minimalist artist. He engages with the background and the foreground content, as well as the layers upon layers that he talks about in South Asian art, with its subtle lines and a thorough gird, of which one can see soft reflections on the canvas: diminishing and becoming lighter in tone at one end and on the other end slightly darker and stronger. There is this conversation underway between the bold strokes of black transitory lines - the trademark of a minimalist - with the soft lines of pencil on white in the background. What with that linear image of a minimalist, and the series of lines forming a cluster from a distance, Talpur with dexterity brings abstract impression into both the minimalist and Op Art traditions. This is one of the most essential qualities that the artist showed through his works on display, ranging from the meditative, cathartic and sublime to the more calligraphy-based paintings. Even the reed pen with ink or the brush dipped in ink or acrylic had this ambiguous quality, in that one could not even tell the medium used.
Acrylic on canvas
Ink on paper
The lines, dots and dashes all curve in a serpentine manner across the canvas
Calligraphy is the primary medium of communication Talpur uses, reflecting the philosophy of the mystics. True to his medium - the bare pencil grid on the canvas; the plan, design and culmination of lines and forms – Talpur’s art initiates a meditative process that takes you to the more calm, peaceful and serene regions of the body and the soul. One hopes that when the process of construction and deconstruction on the roads of our beloved Lahore comes to a halt, the resulting infrastructural grid will take us to our homes in that very soft, subtle and tranquil manner of his art: distinctive of true refinement, development and intellect.
