y first glance at Javaid Mughal’s suite of fifteen paintings, titled In the Company of Strangers, that went on show at Sanat Initiative in Karachi, reminded me of a game called Statue we used to play as children. Two boys entered into a pact as partners in the game. It would be solemnised by touching each other’s little finger of the right hand. Whenever the two crossed each other’s path, each tried to be the first to shout “statue!” while holding the index and middle fingers in the manner of directing a pistol at a target. The other was then expected to freeze in the position they were in, until release by the first boy by uttering “off.” The targeted boy could then resume movement. The postures in which the boys were stilled evoked a statue, a choreographic stance that had not existed on the onlooker’s mind before the sudden suspension of movement. Considering that there was a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ to the freeze, the game unfolded in time. The ‘freeze’ moment is what forms the canvas of Javaid Mughal’s work currently on display. The images and scenes are stilled strategically to form the matrix of these canvases.

As for the content, Javaid Mughal tries to depict the anomalies of the urban situation. As a student, he had been interested in the nuances of human relationships. This preoccupation remains and has become more acidic. To him, the urban situation seems caged and superficial. Mughal’s settings are entirely urban; landscape and other elements of nature do not intrude into his cityscapes in which a man’s predicament lies in the artificial surroundings of his own making. He is, however, too rational to look at the city as malevolent or diabolical. In fact, part of the fascination in his work lies in its fixation with the visual poetics of urban existence.

Mughal is in love with the city and the extraordinary energy of its seething life. He is roused to anger by its desecration or by the brutalisation of its citizens by social, cultural and economic pressures. In peddlers, scooter-drivers, barbers and scores of other petty traders and professionals – people whose patience, toil, courage and humour in the struggle for survival and to provide for their families take on an epic quality - he finds the true heroes of the urban scene. Humble people reconciling their differences through the patterns into which they shape their lives no matter how great the odds, and not some idealistic revolutionaries and idealogues, according to him, are the heroes of the great urban revolution. One is reminded thus of Intisaab, a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz:

Aaj kay naam

aur

Aaj kay gham kay naam...

Clerkon ki afsurda janon kay

naam...

Post-manon kay naam

Tongay walon kay naam,

Rail banon kay naam

Ka khanay kay bhookay

jayalon kay naam

By sheer determination and hard work, Mughal has acquired the technical excellence of a mature painter. This has enabled him to tackle large surfaces with special attention to their structure. The human forms filled with strong complimentary or analogous colours, depending on the mood of the subject, laid in vigorous brushstrokes are indicative of a robust painter. The figures and their multiple engagements/ activities bear witness to a sensitive painter’s awareness of his social environment. These figures evoke scenes experienced on the street, the academic institutions, the marketplace – either a man or a group of men and women indulging their cell phones, chatting or tik-toking, or worse still, playing dumb charades. The poignancy of such situations is enhanced by the way the figures are arranged, their stances and the sombre palette that successfully combines to communicate, however figuratively, the gravity of the predicament of the entire society.

In Innocent Enemies I, the figures appear to be of a middle-class background and dressed appropriately in jeans and slacks and shirts. Although, the space around them is bereft of any semblance of a concrete environment, the figures are perfectly recognisable as distinct people. As members of a community, they are not self-consciously posed for a portrait; nor are they observed through a key hole. They are grouped by the artist to reveal the intercutting trajectories of their will and expectation; the relative stress upon their differently developed egos.

The artist may not be there among them but the situations and their narration carry an emotional charge which is sustained unflinchingly, stretching the moments to the length of incidents or sequences of memory. These views, quite commonplace at one level, leave us, on the other, with some fundamental riddles about the human connection. Riddles tied around the nucleus of social relationships: colleagues, fellow students, associates, friends, lovers, rivals, soul-mates. These relationships are the source of tremendous emotional energy. The artist often takes the liberty to shift the emphasis from the special to the common every day, encompassing within the range, a crisis of emotion.

In a reversal of roles, a picture with a riddle provides the clue to the absence and presence. For that, Mughal uses the static nature of the image to a very special advantage. Superimposing attachments that would unfold in time, he shows us two opposite phenomena at once: the mutability of those seemingly eternal bonds once the entire complex comes to be pictured in the adult consciousness. These images, give us at their best, visual evidence of the way the so-called essential self is, in fact, socially constructed – the evolving self, contributing more and more as the construction proceeds, commanding its own destiny.

Mughal’s recent paintings treat destiny more bluntly as a metaphor for choice within a social construct. A greater range of characters is introduced. There are, among them, independent figures representing a specific class situation. But while the artist demystifies the notion of destiny, the new paintings recount the narrative in the nature of a psychological novel. Classical tragedy shows the principal characters play out their destinies to the point of self-destruction. The concept of the tragic is subjected to the mundane routine of middle-class lives, marking it as a parameter of the consciousness and persona of the young men and women in our society.

In Self-styled Heroes, young hoodlums are shown caught in a specific and banal circumstance – the social and societal ambitions of the urban dweller. The humiliation of personal dignity is the real tragedy. Invariably, the characters in Mughal’s paintings avoid eye contact with the painter/ viewer – a typical theatrical device echoing the notion of the dramatic conception of painting. It also brings to mind Diderot’s notion of clair-obscur: to prevent the eye from straying, by fixing its gaze on certain objects.

In Theatre of the Absurd I and II, Mughal’s technique has indexical correspondence with the image of a performative situation at a wedding. Undoubtedly, with this group of paintings, each of which suspends a significant moment from a narrative capturing the tenor of the emergent modern urban middle-class life, transformed into compelling images that border on identity crisis through a highly individual idiom, Javaid Mughal has entered a new phase in his work.

The writer is an art critic based in Islamabad