Written by: Nimra Khan
Posted on: December 15, 2023 | 
| 中文
Creation of Adam in a Cafe
A recent solo show at Canvas Gallery titled “Doubts, Dreams, Desires” presents the latest body of work by the eminent artist, art critic, curator, author and educationist, Quddus Mirza, who’s avant-garde approach manifests in all these facets of his being. Contemporary views of art reject rigid boundaries in art that entrap ideas in neat descriptive boxes, redefining what art is and what form self-expression can take. Mirza’s work adheres to this view of art, subverting traditionalist alignments to art through not only his art practice, but also his writings, curatorial work and teaching methods.
This latest show presents work in the signature Mirza style of gestural spontaneity, expressed intuitively that betrays a certain visceral urgency. From the color palate to the drawing style, the work derives from and explores base emotions, such as fear, rage and lust. It reaches into a place dictated by pure instinct, the id, thus the imagery, which may seem heavily stylized, is on the contrary rather simplified and distilled, until it appears like a child’s drawing. Mirza uses models for these portraits but the end result is far from visually representational, but rather appears anecdotal in its content.
Drawing the Line
The haphazard scribbling in a basic yet bold color palette, as well as the various found objects, toys, printed material and stickers collaged onto the canvas further create an infantile appearance. The only time human expression is unfiltered and unadulterated is during childhood, when our creativity is still unbridled, uninfluenced by the vast world, and nature still reigns supreme over nurture. These visuals are, thus, highly expressive, invoking myriad emotions in the viewer that perhaps are meant to mirror those of the artist’s during the work’s inception.
Portrait of a Painter in a Chaos
In a similar vein, the themes inherent in Mirza’s works also center around ideas of our primal needs and desires. There is a running commentary on the nature of violence, its prevalence in society since time immemorial, and our proclivity to it as a species, so much so that it has become imbedded within our psyche. It almost becomes an addiction, or even a source of pleasure. The bold reds, blacks and oranges invoke this idea, representing both love and violence, beauty and trauma, celebration and death. A lot of the imagery is also both sexual and violent in nature, thus forging a link between the two.
The Ghost Rider
The collaged objects further this narrative in their coded language. While the initial mark-making is impulsive, not all aspects of the paintings rely on untethered emotions, and these artefacts are pre-meditated. The artist admits it can take up to 2 years to resolve a piece as he adds layers both physically and metaphorically, and these objects are well thought out, researched, and acquired specifically for this purpose to make his statement.
The Black Car Bleeding
From pieces of a toy gun to bright and shiny stickers of fighter jets, the themes of violence are translated in a similar child-like vernacular to assert its base and primitive nature, yet the jarring contrast in itself becomes a layered statement on the death of innocence, desensitization to provocative imagery and the direct and indirect victims of the horrors in this world. The artist says this is not about a particular place or event but the violence intrinsic in human nature, yet with images of fighter jets, explosions, bloody corpses, maps and national flags presented in a childish scrawl, such as in “Centre of the World” and “Under This Blazing Sky”, it becomes impossible not to relate it to the current political events unfolding in Gaza.
Under This Blazing Sky
Alongside this running commentary, there are other themes that can be seen in individual works. Most of the works seem to emerge from a personal space and everyday life experiences, and are shrouded in ambiguity, yet viewers can create certain linkages and arrive at their own conclusions. There is a recurrence of images that indicate the passage of time, such as clocks and calendars, which combines with the artist’s visual style and speaks about the idea of nostalgia and growing old, of transitional phases and of the inevitability of death as the clock counts down. However, the intentions here may well be entirely unrelated for the artist himself.
For the most part, we see many images from mundane life presented in a chaotic garb, exaggerated to the point of grotesqueness. We see scenes from the artists own life, and perhaps those of his peers in the studio and in the classroom, in works like “Portrait of a Painter in a Chaos”, “Artist at Work”, “Drawing the Line”, “In the Solitude of Studio” and “Chronicles of my Time”. There seems to be an almost meta commentary with palettes and paint brushes stuck onto the canvas, and drawings of flowery still lives within the paintings. Many of the works just seem to be searching out the peculiarities in mundanity, little moments of quirkiness that only an artist can see.
Chronicles of My Time
What one is compelled to wonder is whether this is a celebration of banality for banality’s sake, or is it an escape from the horrors that have become a norm for so many. The artist shows us both within one show, set against one another, from a quiet scene in a studio to a bloody landscape of red houses, which makes the violent images all the more devasting and sinister. Even as we go about our peaceful lives carrying our everyday tasks, for someone in another place, there is chaos, death and destruction, and it is our apathy towards it that allows the horrors to continue unabated.
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