Written by: Shameen Arshad
Posted on: August 20, 2021 | 
| 中文
Itwar Bazaar
Qadir Jhatial claims he “just wants to paint for the eye”. Doing away with complex concepts, the Lahore-based artist primarily focuses on painting pleasing, aesthetic visuals. His practice is fuelled primarily by this love for creating beautiful images, he paints for the sake of painting.
Qadir Jhatial graduated with a BFA degree from National College of Arts, Lahore (2012) and an MA degree from Beaconhouse National University, Lahore (2020). The canvas of this artist reveals the absurdity of a chaotic, crowded, yet spirited society. He depicts sights he has seen that contain so much life within them that they do not need any extra embellishment. Jhatial selects common, seemingly lacklustre urban spaces and proceeds to paint them with an exciting chromatic palette to represent the multiple lives that thrive within a metropolis.
Qadir Jhatial
The rich and complex heritage of Lahore has always inspired art, literature, and music. Even today, talented people and artists flock to the city, making it a breeding ground for art and culture. Similarly, Jhatial seems to be enticed by the urban metropolis that he now calls home. His practice, though not making any direct references to the city, shows a heavy influence of Punjabi culture.
Jhatial’s visually pleasing images are not just that. They also have a lot to offer the discerning viewer in terms of subject matter. Simplistic titles such as “Ice Candyman” or “Itwar Bazaar” leave room for interpretation, actively engaging the viewer, who is invited to build the rest of the picture based on their knowledge and experience.
The artwork is full of contradictions. The visual language threads the line between abstraction and figuration, realistic depiction and fantasy. The subject matter shifts between the idea of ephemerality and permanence, the obvious and the cryptic, the concrete and the intangible.
A Walk Under the Orange Sky
Jhatial’s work is inclusive. For people who want a break from their mundane reality, it offers a form of escapism. On the other hand, the more socially conscious witness the struggles of the underprivileged, the performance of different societal rituals or even a city victim to overpopulation. The artist helps his audience encounter characters and navigate spaces that they might otherwise miss due to inaccessibility. By bringing them into the gallery space, he reduces the distance between his subjects and their audience.
The artist’s images are made of several coats of flat colour, layered upon canvas, an apt technique to represent the layers that make up the cityscapes he captures: the layers of time, routines, and the human sentiments that make up a city.
Under the Green Shade
Enamel paints are not very versatile by nature, resulting in lesser shades and solid patches of colour. To counter this limitation, the artist moulds and manipulates his medium in every way possible to achieve a diverse range of colour to play with. Jhatial, though seen to be experimenting with his medium, sticks to smooth paint application, staying true to the nature of the paint. Jhatial’s choice of using an inflexible medium to represent the versatility of a city, adds a certain irony to his work.
The artist cleverly uses his oil-based medium to represent disparate narratives that run parallel to each other upon his canvas. The amorphous patches of colour, each clearly demarcated with high contrast hues, stand together to contribute to a larger picture, like pieces of a puzzle. Therefore, it is an apt way to represent a city, which is an amalgamation of a vast, discordant landscape, infrastructure and human sentiments. His painting method stands as a metaphor for the complexity of the spaces. It also talks about the act of revisiting sites, in person or in memory, and about how time changes our perception of a space.
19 Lodge Road
He uses his bright palette as an essential tool for narration. Just like the colours, we are exposed to a plethora of human sentiments as several narratives unfold within a space. No one emotion is prominent, just as in a crowd of people no one human sentiment takes centre stage. The uniform treatment of paint gives equal status to all parts of the image. The overlapping of several narratives is what makes Jhatial’s images an imitation of life, which is further realized through off centre or non-curated compositions.
Jhatial’s images are in sync with the fast-paced world, and consequently depleting attention spans. The artist creates images that are stripped of extraneous details, helping us instantly absorb the subtleties within a scene. The images present the impalpable and intangible that reside within a concrete world. It is not simply the imitation of life that the artist is interested in, it is that which is fleeting and absent to the naked eye. Such as the intimacy present at a family picnic, the therapeutic ritual of grabbing a cup of tea with your friends after a hard day’s work, or the simple pleasure of playing cards under the shade of a tree on a hot Lahori afternoon.
Card Players
Most recently, Jhatial exhibited his work in his second solo show at Khaas Contemporary, Islamabad, after his first solo “Streetwise” in 2015 in the same space. Having both his solos at one gallery, gives a greater sense of evolution in the practice of the artist about how he has changed over the years of his time in Lahore. As the images grow bolder, one suspects the artist’s growing familiarity with the city’s rhythm and his assimilation into the Lahori community.
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