Afshar Malik’s paintings are seductive microcosms of pattern and color. You are lured in by the prismatic colors and then held captive by the characters that inhabit this playfully composed world. His recent show at Canvas Gallery titled The Garden of Love and Otherness, was curated by Quddus Mirza. A selection of twenty works created by Malik within the last two years, showcased the artist in the full bloom of his mature style and thought.
The use of vivid color, ornamental pattern, and storytelling are essential elements in Malik’s work. Moreover, in this show he seems to have shaken off the methods of conventional painting and experimented instead with atypical ingredients to present his vibrant imagery. The surface upon which he lays color is melamine or more specifically melamine trays. The raised edges of the trays enclose a recessed surface upon which Malik has painted directly with industrial oil-paint markers. The very hard, flat and non-absorbent surface of the trays allows for a flat and even application of color with the markers. Malik applies these colors directly onto the tray and his hand draws and paints simultaneously. The strident neon quality of the industrial markers suits his color palette. The possibility of pre-mixing colors does not exist, and he creates tones by layering. He considers the direct application of line with color to be a shedding of painterly inhibition and lets the pleasure of spontaneous drawing guide his hand.
The show exudes nostalgia. Firstly, it recalls the past by conjuring the spirit of painting in the Fauvist style. Over a hundred years ago, Matisse, Derain and Vlaminck startled viewers with their brilliant and unnatural use of color in their 1905 show, held at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, which earned them the title of “les fauves” or wild beasts from the art critic Louis Vauxelles. The colors were meant to represent emotional states and psychological realities rather than create the illusion of naturalness. As a modernist painter, Malik perpetuates the legacy of European Expressionism in his art.
The second and more personally nostalgic element in the show concerns the source of inspiration for the paintings. They are drawn from a collection of family photographs which represents the artist’s engagement with his own past that he now reincarnates through art. The themes of memory, recall, absence and presence, intertwine and create an interesting dynamic between the past and the present— a dynamic that Malik curates quite deliberately by visiting his collection of photographs from time to time, and discarding the ones he feels have no emotional value to offer. In this manner, Afshar’s role in recalling the past is that of a protagonist rather than a passive recipient of random memory fragments.
The artworks contain overt references to their photographic source as well as abstracted and fantastical landscapes. The mood varies from the recognizably real to mythical and imaginative.
The painting titled Eye of the Two is a close-up of a face with a camera held up in the act of capturing an image. There are playful ambiguities with the concept of the direct gaze. Yes, the camera is directly accosting the viewer and vice versa. At the same time, it also mediates between the man taking the photograph and us. His ‘reality’ is entirely what he aims the camera at. All else is temporarily excluded. The focus is acute. Keeping the idea of focus in mind, we can then transfer it mentally to the ability old photographs have of focusing faded and forgotten memories. They become repositories of a past that may never be remembered unless we behold the photograph. Thus, we engage in a form of time travel triggered by a visual artefact.
From a Rain Cloud Album shows a man and a woman seated next to one another and yet absorbed in their own thoughts. The idea of multiple frames of consciousness presents itself through this image. Two individuals may occupy very disparate realities at a single moment. The silence between them divides like a chasm. Conversely the lithe, young couple in One in the Balance are at intimate ease with one another as are the podgy, older couple in Dog’s Old Master’s Day.
Afshar is a careful observer of body language. Comradely affection comes through in Love and Regards. Two young men in uniform are photographed arm in arm. They seem to have their whole life ahead of them. Yet the date on the signed photograph reads June’45 – the year World War II ended. This detail adds poignancy to the narrative being related by the artist about two friends who are soldiers in a grim period of history.
The backdrop against which the characters are presented is carefully composed by Malik and its significance cannot be underestimated. Bands of saturated color are broken into segments that may contain decorative pattern. The artist describes his embrace of decoration as an obsession. The obsession, however, is expressed through a carefully modulated balance of decoration and imagery.
This magical landscape is the artist’s fantasy playground; a world where rules for single point perspective and convergence become irrelevant. A dream state is invoked by the floating forms, intense colors, riddling shapes and biomorphic forms that invoke the legacy of Matisse and Chagall. Afshar is candid in acknowledging the legacy of European masters and states their influence is inescapable. Perhaps as tribute to the European tradition, Malik borrows the figure of the sower from Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower (1888) and inserts it into the painting titled Man Made Men.
Escaping the rules of perspective is a deliberate choice made by Malik in order to express his intuitive understanding of space. However, his skill in rendering conventions of perspective is evident in the work titled Red Rock. This is a pure landscape painting rendered in fantastical color. A magnificent tree looms in the foreground while rock formations recede into the distance. Despite the use of exaggerated color, the recession and depth conveyed in the painting are tangible.
It is important to underscore that Malik’s revelry of color and form is a means of storytelling. The narrative can range from straightforward imagery to the highly enigmatic. Grey Fog Melody and Duck Swims in its Paradise Blue are inhabited by androgynous characters who tantalize with the ambiguity of their gender.
In contrast to the obviously photographic paintings in which the characters pose for the camera, these enigmatic characters seem to occupy a parallel dimension where the logic of our quotidian lives is set aside for a dream-like world. The enigma can extend to mysterious landscapes, devoid of human presence as in Micro Night Out and Heart of the Blue.
In a wider context, Pakistani modernism with its inflections from European art played a dominant role from the time of the country’s inception. As we immerse ourselves in Afshar Malik’s psychedelic playground of color and memory, we also engage with this influential tradition which has retained its relevance despite the burgeoning of contemporary styles in art.
Nusrat Khawaja
Nusrat Khawaja is an independent researcher, curator, and landscaper. She writes on art and literature. She is a member of the Karachi Biennale Discursive Committee.
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