In a Seductive Key:
The Intimate Paintings of Attiya Shaukat and Mudassar Manzoor

Mark van Proyen

Seductive Key - Life tree catalogue

Seductive Key - Freefall

Because contemporary art aspires to prove that it is socially important in a world governed by the mechanisms of mass media and mass marketing, recent art history has perhaps been too eager to follow suit by according easy respect to painters who aspire to paint “the big picture,” which is supposed to automatically equate with big ideas and grand ambition. Indeed, during the past five decades, the rhetoric of painting has frequently coincided with the rhetoric of architecture, meaning that visual conviction has often times been measured in terms of how a given painting “declares” its surface into the physical spaces inhabited by its viewers. This represents a stark contrast to more traditional modes of painterly rhetoric that operate by seducing the viewer into their own insular worlds of imaginative fancy, offering up proverbial messages in a bottle that convey the imaginary possibilities of intimate and delicate spaces. Attiya Shaukat and Mudassar Manzoor are two painters whose works bring such imaginary spaces into the forefront of the viewer’s attention, with compelling results.

Shaukat’s small paintings on paper initially reveal themselves to the viewer’s eye as precise depictions of isolated, ominous objects set in semi-flat/ semi-atmospheric spaces, all earmarked with stunning saturations of brilliant color and intricate, technically accomplished ornamental elaborations. Sometimes these ornamental passages are literally attached to the works’ surfaces in the form of precise physical stitching, while in other instances they are the results of painterly applications that evince a painstaking attention to detail. But even though Shaukat’s works are all wonderful examples of a highly developed naturalistic technique, their beguiling pictorial spaces are suffused with an otherworldly Magical Realism that makes their contents seem as if they were remembered from a particularly vivid dream. In Shaukat’s case, that dream is the recurring nightmare reflecting a traumatic accident that the artist experienced while hanging her MFA exhibition at the National College of Art in Lahore, Pakistan, one that left her partially paralyzed after a long and difficult medical ordeal. Thus, when we see the folded wheelchair and tall stepladder pictured in Freefall (2008), we notice that these ominous objects are presented as redemptive talismans as much as anything else, made so by the subtle tilt of the work’s perspective, suggesting that to adopt its point of view means looking upward while laying immobilized on the ground.

Manzoor’s work also brings some elements of Magic Realism to the fore, but in it there is more of an emphasis on seeing how the intervals between oddly juxtaposed objects can start to become present in the work’s abrupted pictorial spaces. Oftentimes, the work’s narrative subject matter seems to be almost hiding behind elegant clouds of atmospheric color, as if they were but small components of a cosmic fantasy. In other instances, we note the presence of objects that seem both specific and non-specific, maximizing the uncertainty about whether or not they are formed by any kind of descriptive fidelity to a concrete entity.  For example, in Fallen (2008), we see what appears to be the figure of a dead woman, her blood suffusing into fantastical clouds as she appears to be ascending toward a kind of heaven.  Within the clouds, one can detect what appear to be aspects of the internal anatomy of the human body, painted as if they had a life of their own. The important point here is to see how fantasy and reality converge as if they were being fused in a dream, but this one might be particularly harrowing in that it seems to be an oblique reference to the 2007 assassination of Benazir Bhutto, signaling a moment of political horror when Pakistan would threaten to slide into the turmoil that is so present in its neighboring countries. In describing the work of both artists, I have resorted to the use of the term “Magic Realism,” which has become a traditional western shorthand used to describe any naturalistic painting style that portrays imaginary subject matter. But for Shaukat and Manzoor, the historical sources of that Magic Realism are non-western, those being the Persian-derived traditions of miniature painting practiced in northwestern India during (or immediately after) the Mughal Period (1526-1858). Such paintings usually depicted court scenes, heroic figures or stylized aspects of the natural world with a stunning subtlety that was also rich in compositional sophistication.

It is interesting to note that both artists use western gouache paints in concert with added pigments and other materials. Gouache can be used in an aqueous mode like sumi ink or watercolor, or it can be used in an opaque mode similar to acrylic polymer, but without the latter’s quasi-technological plasticine sheen. This is the closest common material equivalent that we have for the egg tempera that was the featured medium for the practice of miniature painting in Persia and western Asia from the 15th to the 19th centuries, and both artists gain excellent effect from it. The stunning luminosity of both artists’ work is the most salient example of this effect, as gouache in its translucent mode amplifies the light reflected by the underlying paper, while in its opaque mode we see how it allows for crisp interactions of the kind of vibrant chromatics that give rich reward to our explorations of their many nuances.
 
Mark van Proyen is a northern California-based artist and art critic.  He is Associate Professor of Studio Practice and Interdisciplinary Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute.  He is co-editor of Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man (University of New Mexico Press, 2005) and author of Administrativism and its Discontents (SUNY Stony Brook, 2007).  He is also a Columnist and Contributing Editor for ARTWEEK Magazine and a Corresponding Editor for Art in America.

 

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