December 27, 2008

Bidding farewell to 2008, Chawkandi Gallery showcased two meditative paintings by Sumaya Durrani earlier this month. Her only two canvases, despite a prominent difference in size, share fundamental and conceptual understanding.

Spiritually and aesthetically charged, Durrani’s canvases picture her personal experience, observation and belief and ideology.

Every good composer of art, poetry, prose and visual art looks at life with a certain point of view and contemplates over its material and spiritual aspects. During the process, certain questions are raised and answers are sought. The creator’s psychological condition is accessed by going through these answers. However, most of today’s visual art tends to be questioning alone. It reveals emotional cataclysm, and current political and social conditions and resulting pains and problems related to the artist’s life. Their lines and colours narrate the nerve breaking and heart rending affairs tinged with bitterness and sadness sprouting from their psychological state.

A good artist will balance his work with forces from his subconscious and energy from conscious. Durrani’s two artworks divulge intellect culturing self affliction. Her intellect is revealed through her idea of pain and her intuitive energy suggests a remedy to the pain. Her work is an answer to the questions scattered on canvases by various painters.

An artist with energy, Durrani is among the very few artists in Pakistan who have studied philosophy and think down deep into issues they wish to portray. She challenges herself to work within a limited framework so far as the material aspect is concerned — material here meaning the visible symbols. Her content crosses borders and rises to the universal heights as it deals with action performed in the light of knowledge derived from intuitive source.

This is true that we cannot picture Durrani’s character by her artworks made public so far, neither can we form an ultimate opinion about it; but we, to some extent, can survey her psychological state. In her case, the nature of expression is very important for the rating of her artwork. The question of nature directly leads to those psychic and mental states which urge or provide an aura for the germination of her artwork.

She does not play with emotional dissatisfaction giving rise to isolation, cynicism, depression etc., which is rampant these days and many artists are producing artworks under these spells. What one sees in Durrani’s work is not poetics alone; behind these colours and lines and forms are hidden specific ideologies, ideas, concepts and philosophies which are related to the artist’s emotions, sentiments and outlook. She moulds these emotions, sentiments, concepts and outlook into an aesthetic artwork and presents it to the viewer. This outcome satisfies the aesthetics of the viewer on the one hand and on the other, reveals its unconscious shifts and intentions.

Durrani believes in spiritual purification in times of distress. She uses one single word which is an esteemed name for the believers, as a form repeatedly. Prayer is repetition and repetition is a reminder. In that moment of prayer, every human is at its best. She also is at her best in the rendition of these works; these are a designer’s efforts with purity of soul.

This four letter word has a lively significance for spiritual or mystical speculation, which seeks to reveal, through the veil of appearance, the hidden reality in terms of intelligible form. The alchemy of four letters combined in a word symbolises the desire for geometry of the soul, achieved by spiritual excises. From the root of this word, an extensive growth proliferates. This form is, so to speak, a poem dedicated to the glory of God.

On Durrani’s canvases, this word is by no means, simply decoration; its germination is encoded and takes form in the singular structure of a language. This establishes a mode at many different levels, departing from, but connected to, a firm rhythm. It takes us to the metaphysical ideas of form and substance, or matter and spirit.

The repetition however does not create monotony; it rather creates equilibrium, fluidity and musical vibration, which in turn, gives birth to visual illusion. What emerges here, on the plane of transcendental existence, is not simply the effect of an image or symbol concealing the human countenance, but the whole body contained in its sacred envelope. Durranis’s intellectual capitol gives value to her canvases.

 

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