Written by: Khadijah Rehman
Posted on: September 17, 2019 | 
| 中文
Zahid Mayo at work (photo credits to Zahid Mayo on Instagram)
The script curls and undulates as if alive, crawling over walls, trickling onto floors and wrapping itself around ledges. The letters are Urdu calligraphy, precise and sharp, yet playful - snippets borrowed from the ruminations of long dead poets and blended together into a cross between writing and drawing. Zahid Mayo is not bound by the limitations of paper or canvas. A visual artist and National College of Arts (NCA) alumnus, his studio is crammed with found trinkets, large half-finished oil paintings on walls, and the aforementioned writing flung over surfaces, with the devil may care playfulness that accompanies creation for creation's sake.
Mayo creates huge, melancholic oil paintings of local crowds, and each stroke is deliberated and thought out. He has amassed admiration for himself through his large scale calligraphic mark making on trees, old buildings, the abandoned husk of a train, and other surfaces found in public spaces, taking long walks and leaving behind dark winding letters, his own words fusing with those of ancient poets.
Calligraphy on an abandoned train (photo credits to the writer)
At his alma mater, myths of Mayo have found their way from one fine arts batch to the next. Mayo the madman, who once burned his paintings before a jury, or a crazed Mayo who would display his work up on barely accessible rooftops instead of confining it to the studio space. In real life too, the man is an anomaly. Clad in a kurta and chappals, cigarette between thin fingers, he is taken aback by the resilience of these anecdotes in the face of passing time, but acknowledges them to be true. Rather like his work, he himself isn't bound to notions of space or permanence.
Much of his initial time at NCA was spent without room or residence, nights spent in the cold painting studio, something he laughingly shrugs off as a series of events worthy of a tragic film. There is a madness to his process, but he offers no elaborate explanations for his work, and vehemently denies the need for elucidations. "The painting is complete and an existence unto itself, once I finish and hang it up. It does not need my assistance or my voice. If it does, it has failed to say anything for itself."
A Painting of Mourners (credits to Zahid Mayo on Facebook)
Massive, melancholic paintings of crowds of the working class were where Mayo started as a young graduate. There was a frenzy to his work, form shaped by intense light and shadow, faces fading into backgrounds and blending into the night, gestural dabs of paint wracked with torment. The artist has always done exactly what his heart desires, led by the brush, making marks on a whim, covering up layer after layer like a magician putting on a show with no end in mind.
Group painting (photo credits to writer)
Intense visions of sufi dhamaals and moody scenes of majlis and maatam have found their way onto his canvas, although he does not identify as Shia. Throngs upon throngs of men in the street, illuminated by the yellow glow of street lamps, dance in ecstasy or perform maatam, while Mayo observes and recreates with the deft empathy of a healer and a poet. He is more borrower than pilferer, his gaze is not an intrusion but a means of intimate recording. He does not profess to be a mouthpiece for the masses, his is the work of a bystander and observer. Crowds are how he loses himself, throwing himself into a warm wave of human bodies, giving himself to the unison of their chants and washing ashore, cleansed.
Muharram painting (photo credits to the writer)
Born in a small village to a family of labourers and enraptured by acts of creating, Mayo describes wanting to run away. The rich man's hobby, he remembers wryly, is what his father said painting was. "My father, unconvinced by what he considered were haughty aspirations, would always tell me of how a low hanging piece of fruit on a tree was more reachable and fared well. This puzzled me, as I had seen the low hanging fruit on trees being devoured by cows and donkeys." Thus Mayo floated to Lahore, throwing himself into painting, bringing with him his history of scrawling calligraphic text onto banners and boards for the local village mosque or Muharram processions. This text slowly bled into his art practice, becoming a recurring motif in his paintings and later, a smattering on his surroundings.
Caligraphy Markings on Trees
Now, under the name of Saazish, Mayo is creating merchandise for sale, clothes and tote bags adorned with his calligraphic musings. This is a man who responds to his primal need to create through a smorgasbord of expressions and surfaces, unconcerned with man-made ideas of high or low art. While his paintings tread a gossamer thread between tranquility and suffering in ways that would confound the critic, his merchandise is an aptly named saazish, a conspiratorial scheme to create wearable and usable art for sale in a time when art is placed on polished pedestals or hung on glistening white walls. The staggering spirit behind Zahid Mayo’s words and pictures is undeniable. There is a wild, Whitmanesque quality to his existence, perhaps explained best by poet Walt Whitman himself:
Saazish Collection jeans
"I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world."
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