hile driving to his house from his workplace, GM (Ghulam Mohammad) informed – and impressed - me by revealing that he can speak seven languages: Seraiki, Punjabi, Balochi, Brahui, Dari (Persian), Pashto and Urdu. “English?” I asked, and the reply was, “not really.” The immense capacity in a person to grasp seven tongues and uses an eighth, the vocabulary of visual art, is incredible. In his work the written, spoken and pictorial languages become one. This is like when on road we listen to an update, read directions and recognise a sign, the three modes of communication survive side by side in our life. Since it was turned into writing around 5,000 years ago, language has served several functions: to record and remind of heroic acts/ sojourns, to preserve religious messages and to document mundane commercial dealings. Hence, the first discovered example of Mesopotamian writing – as Yuval Noah Harari informs us in his book Sapiens – was a receipt for “29,086 measures of barley over the course of 37 months.” Likewise, “the earliest alphabet invented around 1,800 BCE by Semitic-speaking people,” as found on a “bronze age comb from ancient kingdom of Judah,” with the oldest known written sentence: “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard.”

Language, spoken, or written, is composed of units that have their commonly perceived meanings. However, these accepted meanings are compromised or altered with the shift in voice, or stress in handwriting. Same words, in today’s MS Word document would mean different, if they appear in bold, italic, or a casual/ calligraphic fonts like Mistral. GM, recognising this bond between language and sentence, style and sound, frees it in his art. The (only Pakistani) winner of prestigious Jameel Prize, in 2016, he has been occupied with text since receiving two degrees – in 2013) and 2017 - from the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.

To his colleagues and students (from his alma mater), GM is a person of few words, yet his art is all about transcribing language. This appears to be a contrast, if not a conflict; but once probed and analysed, his visual vocabulary is found connected to his minimal, precise and intelligent discourse. The artist, originating from Kachhi, Balochistan, speaks Seraiki at home and switches to other tongues in various situations/ locations. Like most of us, he is a perpetual interpreter.

An interpreter is constantly deconstructing sentences, phrases, structures and the grammar of a language to express the content in another language. This process takes place quickly, seamlessly and simultaneously (by diplomatic, academic, business interpreters). It leads to the view that the mechanism of language - any language for that matter - as segments that can be dismantled and joined; sounds that differ but have the same subject matter. In the lingo of art: form is not tied to its content.

Similarly, the language is not bound to text or a script. A book can be entirely memorised like the Holy Quran. A volume is often penned or published in varying scripts. For instance, the early manuscripts of Arabic books are in Kufic, followed by Maghribi, Rayhani, Naskh and several other scripts. A novel written in Hindi can be translated into Urdu by replacing Devanagari letters with Urdu letters. So a scribe, or a translator, deals with the metamorphosis of text on a formal/ outward level.

Yet meanings do change in every conversion, as happens in the art of GM. His meticulously cut, collected and composed letters or words offer a range of messages – separate from their original and initial content. Most of his material comes from pages of books in regional languages about folklore and linguistics. He plucks each letter, or unit, and places it on a picture plain, so a reader is transformed into a viewer in front of GM’s ink and paper collages on wasli (currently on display at his solo exhibition, Continuance, (from 13th to 22nd December at Canvas Gallery, Karachi).

In that sense, GM is an heir to a number of artists who have incorporated script to build their imagery. They include Anwar Jalal Shemza, Sadequain, Jamil Naqsh, Gulgee and Rashid Arshed. However, there is a distance/ distinction between him and those who were inspired from calligraphy in their art. GM is not inspired by calligraphy, he uses it, like some artists choose pieces of torn newspapers to produce an image: a usual project in our art schools that can be traced back to Cubist surfaces of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, in which sections of printed papers were stuck to painted canvases.

In Cubist imagery and collage aesthetics, the writing, the text, and the language lose their independence and significance; and serve as a source of inspiration, a colour chart, a pictorial pastiche. In the art of GM, script is not altered, even though it is incised, picked and positioned to create a visual or another text. In his new works, GM addresses the link betweenthe verbal language and the visual space.

For instance, two works, Pas-i-Manzar (background) and Paish Manzar (foreground) through their titles indicate a pictorial and photographic depth in representing reality – but the imagery produced by GM is not stretched in space. Even though one could feel the tactile sensation of a tiny letter, sliced and added with glue to innumerable others, the textured imagery is intentionally constructed along the norms of two-dimensionality.

These two works by GM at Canvas Gallery have the capacity to unveil his frame of thought. When we hear sounds, listen to voices, read words, we are exposed to language in its varying textures. GM in his art negotiates with all these states/ stages. One could imagine the ruffle of sound and the disruption, dispersion and disorientation of meaning; yet these invoke other sensations, something similar aimed by GM through his titles and compositions. Works like Daira Kar (work arena), Hadd (limit), La-Mutnahi (infinite), Pinhaan (hidden), Tamaam (end/ conclusion) are intriguing because these have nothing to do with a literal description or a visual presentation (in comparison to his other pieces like Dareecha (window). For a viewer – a reader, too, – these artworks by GM are more about visual formation than displaying content.

There are similar configurations of letters and multiple intentions and interpretations in various, and relatively simpler, compositions: a circle, a cube, the balance of horizontal and vertical lines. At this point, one speculates about what the artist is aiming at while carving letters and tempering the text. Inclusion of colours in the arrangements of primarily black script; introduction of borders, frames within frames, round shapes; and text travelling outside of the interwoven rectangle (echoing page of a book), are attempts to wrench language away from the domain of literal meaning.

GM’s scheme of joining letters is closer to poetry, in which even if you don’t comprehend a language, you still enjoy the rhythm of sound/ words. This reminds one of Jose Saramago’s observation about his compatriot poet Fernando Pessoa, who according to the Portuguese Nobel laurate, “spent his entire life arranging one word with another.” GM is doing the same, physically, pictorially and metaphorically.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore