The Art of Negation

"I is an Other"

Arthur Rimbaud

Minimal, wry, declarative in tone and with a line mastering the art of the vanishing point, the text and image composition is the closest the artist comes to figuring out the paradox of metaphysics.

Like Giorgio de Chirico, Moeen Faruqi wonders at the tiny particulars that seem to hold the mysteries of vast generalities. Some see infinity in a grain of sand, others in a ray of light. Even the absurdist, , Moeen sees it in the art of negation, and in the jetsam and flotsam of the ordinary human world. In his city, the silence is electric, streets mysteriously empty. The shadows are often unnaturally long for what appears to be noon, although the sun itself is invisible. No light has ever penetrated the sepulchral arcades. Nobody has ever lived in the classical buildings. With its familiar locale and its enigmatic mood, this could be any of Moeen's paintings.

The hardened human image stands still, an emblem in a bleached barren scape that ripples with tides of thick paint. The naked, life-size figure has an element of theatricality, as if caught in a tragic solo performance. Shaped by bold, confident lines, the figure characterises a passive, lonely and transmuted state, while the familiar backdrops are made volatile by the power of the brush which scripts the artist's angst with brutal daubing.

The figure seems not merely alienated from others, but also withdrawn from itself. The isolation of the figure contrasts interestingly with the urbanity of its creator, the Karachi-based artist Moeen Faruqi whose work is on show at the Croweaters Gallery in Lahore.

Moeen's image-making practice is possibly stimulated and replenished by the symbolic realities of Karachi's local/global interface. As an artist, he is a privileged member of the circle of initiates who inhabit the realm of high culture, the circuit of studios, galleries, archives and museums. But as a citizen of Karachi, he is also a participant in an expressive culture staged outside this circuit, a public relay of signs that operates at a variety of levels, ranging from the naive to the sophisticated, the direct to the allusive, the archetypal to the ephemeral.

Moeen's varied registers of concern suggest an analogy with this expressive culture, this kaleidoscopic domain of free-floating signs that is marked by the toxicity of ideology, the effervescence of fantasy and the publicity of aspiration. The artist is familiar with its variegated narratives: celebrity rumour and political demonology; the posters of popular movies; transits displaying giant images of fashion models; billboards advertising goods produced by sleek First World transnational corporates using cheap Third World labour.

Like a diagnostician, Moeen treats these structures, sensations and impulses as symptoms of an individual's mind make-up, his travails and jubilations. His paintings embody a specific reading of, and a strategic response to, the fusion of normality and phantasmagoria, that describes Pakistani metropolitan culture. He responds to its gifts and provocations with irony and playfulness, but his works also carry satire and pathos.

Where his predecessors explored the tragic-classical or hymnal-revolutionary elements dwelling within the modern, the post-modern sensibilities under review emphasise playfulness, morphological fluidity and semantic instability. They allow their sources to carom off one another, provoking the viewer into participating in the art work rather than passively consuming it.

To present the diagnosis succinctly, Moeen appears to be unlearning his reflexes. A narrative/figurative painter in search of a personal idiom, he had in his early drawings and paintings, turned towards internalised images of the world around him. He succeeded in building a comprehensive vision in which man and his surroundings were reunited. Small town mentality, its indolent pace and its bourgeois inhabitants, their seemingly imperturbable faces, their bazaar kitsch taste, their stock attitudes, all lovingly rendered.

The work's guileless, naive, fresh qualities -- along with its frequent undertones of irony, irreverence or deadpan humour -- were as if appropriated from the terra cognita itself.

An iconoclast in more ways than one, Moeen has not only turned around aesthetic conventions in art, but those of so-called societal propriety as well. He achieves the former with the popular cultural references that frame his work in its entire polychromatic glare, and the latter by his dismissal of the fictions perpetrated to maintain social hypocrisies.

The artist is indeed often his own subject. One can see him in the self-portrait, an acrylic on canvas, where the scene is infused with a sense of ceremony -- a bespectacled figure. There is an increasingly succinct quality to the work now, a limpid moment caught on the wing. The details of composition have turned sparer, and the narrative is less like a storyboard and more like pared-down allegories. Drawing is ever present in the sense of directness in the broad, fluid outlines, soft-edged and confident. Without overlays or revisions, the forms free to situate themselves in the world without anxiety or gravity, the painting is an instant of momentous clarity.

The art work is now often seen, not under anticipation as a pre-valued artifact, but as an unpredictable act of intervention between the frame and the world. As such, it negotiates with the site of its location, enunciates various relationships between art and reality. The assertion of art as a conceptual signifying practice -- rather than as a mode of entertainment or of moral edification -- is an argument which many younger artists consciously put forward.

At the same time, impulses from the older disciplines continue to be retransmitted in mutation. The classical genre of figures in the landscape, modified to suit the exigencies of a dramatically altered environment, finds its fulfillment here.

Moeen has made the passage from photorealism to a montage narrative, in which compositional coherence is deliberately made unstable by the levity of a floating allusion. He also evokes the lightness of suburban being of an industrial landscape nibbling at the fringe of the expanding city.

When he portrays existential situations, Moeen condenses the mural scale theme in the miniature format, deploying the figure as a heraldic device. In his case, though radical political and social statement has not been a conspicuous determinant in the work, it has dealt in ingenuous and ingenious ways with several aspects of social stratification in the country -- aesthetic hegemonies and paradoxes and realities of middle-class have continued to be articulated through a passionate fidelity to the painterly medium, even as many of the artistic endeavours and expressions of his colleagues have taken divergent directions due to the changing exigencies of time, place, perceptions, and the ever-shifting markers of contemporaneity.

The story about a painted image is complex in the way it is created in a manner that it is perceived. Painting is foremost an affirmation of the visible, and most artists would confirm that their primary aim is to manifest rather than explain, create rather than define the creation. Frequently, a work of art evolves in the very act of its construction, but the fact that the artist retains certain elements of the work when he could have eliminated them, is evidence that they were intentionally placed.

At times, Moeen uses visual abbreviations, constructing the form with only a few body parts: for instance, the severed leg in the shape of an enlarged bone; a spatter of patterns on an ethereal body; a figure standing upside down like a heavy column with lacerated textures; or an amputated form. This mutilated human is less perfect but more real.

The stiff countenance, far from classical grandeur or narcissistic ideal, is caught in a vulnerable state -- helpless, brittle, and aware of falling apart. As a figure, he is the heroic victim of his time --cynical, absurd, and open to failure.

Disengaged from the living details of everyday life, the human form in Moeen's art is a symbolic cartography that converts the object into idea. There is a complete negation of flesh that leads to an internal interrogation of the form. Moeen's art is less inclined towards the narrational and more towards the notational. In fact, the human figure here acts as a sign, a signal that is pregnant with existential questioning.