n her practice, Mussarat Arif has cultivated a singular vocabulary of abstraction and landscape. The conceptual grounds of the oeuvre on show at Gallery Numaish Gah in Lahore, titled Perspectives, remain in a dialogue with laws of the universe, the cyclicality of time as well as a manifest relatedness between human beings and the webbed fabric of ecology. This painterly world is textured with knowledge and experience that references realms as diverse as ancient culture, ethnic textiles, sacred philosophy, geometry and poetry.

The Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan once remarked: “When you speak of transformation, you have a combination or contrast of a substratum – something that is permanent and something that changes. There is a notion of continuity in the idea of transformation.” It is this fundamental continuity in the artistic journey as a transformative process that gets revealed in Arif’s latest body of work – tracing a steady pictorial lexicon as the bedrock of experience yet enabling a renewed quality of transcendence, like a view from the window. The continuity is borne of technical choices – the artist has persisted in working with oil, acrylic and thread. The vegetal and mineral colouration and the interplay of geometric shapes remain lucidly etched in the scheme of things.

Through ‘landscapes’ bearing form resonant in lines, elemental shapes and circles, the artist has maintained a consciousness around the geometric symbolism and symmetries held within nature. At times the transformation of time plays out in these surfaces – from spring fever, a passage of wind currents, to the gathering of rain clouds – intimately conveyed in the sense boundaries of Arif’s palette.

There are eclipsed moons; we meet an inverted mountainside; and minuscule waves form where the night sky becomes a garden. Some of the work is tactile in its composition, providing a sense of dimensionality to the backdrop and detailed foreground. There are wandering waves and stardust-like specks in an azure sky; shapes reminiscent of Paul Klee or Anwer Jalal Shemza’s ‘metasacapes,’ licks of paint and triangular mounds impressed into an indigo-soaked scenes that resemble how sea tones transform into the dark of the night. In another work, moving threaded lines open up to a terrestrial gradient of soil, shattering the linear gaze into a circulation. In the meditative spatial density of Arif’s recent work there is still the quiet comprehension of the philosophical condition of formlessness.

Some of the earth tones exposed in the artist’s work allude to the contours of baked clay, reminiscent of an archive of living traditions. These cultural antecedents expose Arif’s cultivated understanding of how the modernist idiom remains uniquely connected to artisanal vocabularies and vernacular knowledge from across the subcontinent.

Mussarat Arif has cultivated a sensorial practice of seeing where the unknown element is inevitably encompassed in the composition of the known – like hidden galaxies that remain beyond human observation, nevertheless lighting up the skies under which we survive. The artist charts terrains of the sensed, rather than being restrained by the directly consumable reality. She builds image constellations as a limitless space.

In order to fully comprehend this work, it may be important to take a quick look at the artist’s gleanings and experimentation over years of art practice. Born in Karachi, Arif comes from a spiritual landscape encircled by the sea, flanked by the ranges and clustered with mountains. This scenic/ mystical landscape infused with a spiritual fragrance has witnessed the transformation of the land from its original homophonous culture to its present polyphonic culture – a transformation that has faced resistance and evolved.

Mussarat Arif – an artist of Sindhi-Khatri descent - went to the Karachi School of Arts, and resides in Texas, USA, entrenched in a polyphonic culture. Her early work on wasli expresses layers of timeless struggle. The process of creation itself has always been an exploration of form and content. For Arif, the current body of work is about colour and space. The effort made has been to create a dialogue for each tone and geometric pattern laid on the surface – lending it its own individuality and constructing layers of various tonalities and textures over it, like a farmer tilling the land and preparing the seeds for the season or the village dyer dipping swathes of cloth in vats of water to colour the fabric. Add to that the weaver who intertwines warp and weft to create the web of life.

Mussarat Arif’s new work evokes sentiments that converse with the discourse of Sufi symbolism. This is not to suggest that the artist necessarily set out to do so. It is safe, however, to say that the use of the cosmic symbols - shapes derived from natural forms and geometry in Islamic art throughout its long history - may evoke Sufi symbolism, at least where Arif is influenced by that history.

The notion of being beyond the concrete also evokes a sense that the self is in need of liberation from the limitations of thought and materiality. Instead of employing paradigms encoded by structures of tradition and convention such as language, Arif has developed a complex intertwining of the Sufi notion of fana and the Daoist dialectic of ‘being’ and ‘non-being.’

The writer is an art critic based in Islamabad