Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: January 02, 2020 | 
Painting by Rija Kashif
“Most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
It is these mysterious existences that come into being during this time of the year, with the National College of Arts (NCA) as the monumental nest for young fine artists to display their works. The NCA Bachelors Degree Show helps leap their work into the intimidating maw of the local art world. A cornucopia of art works is a part of the exhibit, from harrowingly laborious miniature paintings, to gigantic hit-or-miss installations. It is a tale told in many voices, trickles from different narratives washing into one another, dark corridors and ancient studios leading the viewer into a labyrinthine experience of sight and sound.
In the gallery, Aisha Suria’s phenomenological, almost grotesque explorations reign over the room. Illustrative, with a ferocity reminiscent of Paula Rego’s oeuvre, distorted figures and faces are emblems of sullenness, in a droopy-eyed, large toothed fashion. Suria’s use of colour and her technique of mark-making are both wonderfully brazen and cathartic.
Painting by Aisha Suria
Figures drawn in charcoal have been covered in a haze of powdery smears, the lines aggressive and hasty. Her pencil drawings too are portraits of characters that seem to be of her own making, bitter faces contorted into expressions devoid of intelligence or comprehension, the artist’s hand mocking the subject. Her oil paintings are similar in their quality of madness and moroseness. The sharp coloured washes of oil on paper and canvas forming warped, gaunt faces, all staring at the audience in an almost beseeching manner.
Yawar Abbas’s large botanical creations in oil on canvas are melancholic oddities, delightful in their starkness and sensitivity. The artist has drawn and painted leafy stems and varying foliage onto white canvases. The line drawings in red seem academic in their observational repetition, and realistically rendered studies consisting of soft dabs of paint.
Painting by Yawer Abbas
Abbas’s repetition and intricacy, alongside the looseness of his lines, makes his huge canvases appear as if they are pages out of an artist’s sketchbook. They are meandering studies of bloom and decay, slow dancing across the surface. His seems to be work that is in progress, a story that has yet to end or resolve itself, much like real life. There is a quiet existential despair in his need to observe and record, and the fragility of his mark making only adds to this feeling of melancholy.
In the next gallery room, Sonya Sarki’s etchings are nighttime anecdotes in black and white. The artist’s prowess is evident in the magnificence of tension between the light and the shadow. Paper thin highlights outlining figures and objects, ordinary yet bewitching buildings emanating nebulous light which dissolves into the dark of the night. Be it lone chaarpaayi (straw bed), car, or the long solitary shadow of a figure on the pavement, inky black yet soft. A nostalgic loneliness is the backdrop of Sarki’s prints, settling into the night, permanent, tangible and almost comforting in its inevitability.
Painting by Sonya Sarki
Upstairs, in the painting studio, Mariam Arshad’s figures in oil have been caught in various stages of self-grooming. The softness of colour and form, lends an ethereal, dreamlike quality to her work. Men and women sit, almost as if in a stupor, faces smeared in cream or foam.
Painting by Mariam Arshad
A cab driver snoozes behind the wheel, talcum powder smeared across cheeks and neck, a local motif that is rooted in both hilarity and familiarity. Three local women look on at the viewer as if looking into a mirror, clustered in a beauty salon, hair pinned back and faces adorned with white cream, the artist’s brushwork deft and dry, a textural trick that further enhances the softness of the women’s skin. A man with coarse, dark skin gets his face shaved under a tree, bloodshot eyes rolling back, mouth slightly agape.
Painting by Mariam Arshad
Perhaps the most enticing quality in these works is their air of midday listlessness, slices of everyday banality cloaked and presented as otherworldly, exotic dreams. Rija Kashif’s zinc etchings are gestural, detailed portraits of aged subjects, spiraling lines and strokes forming old, wrinkled faces against dark backgrounds. There is a dramatic movement to her strokes, the looming threat of passing time and the inevitability of age taking center stage.
On the top floor in the old drawing studio, Fatima Faisal’s oil paintings of men in the nude, lounging or casually posing, are placid musings on the primal nature of man and his approach towards establishing his individuality.
Stripped of individual artificialities such as clothing or accessories, these young men casually slump on sofas or snooze on a bed in instances of untainted solitude. Faisal’s shrewd study of light, form and colour are an homage to both her giddy fascination with the human form, and her urgent desire to comprehend the complexities and vulnerabilities of the people she paints, concluding the viewer’s long, spiraling quest with more questions than answers.
The show will remain open to the public till 12th January.
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