n this age and time, we are prepared for a lot of unseen, unexpected, uncommon spectacle, and enjoy it; like the twin solo shows being held at the same time and location. The exhibition at Canvas Gallery, Karachi (from September 16 to 26) presents this unusual venture. The pieces in Afshar Malik’s show (The Battle) and Ahmed Ali Manganhar’s display (Home and the World) correspond to each other, and converse with the audience in one language, if distinct accents.

There is a distance of two decades in careers, experience and exposure between the two painters. Both graduated in fine arts from the National College of Arts, Lahore, Malik in 1978 and Manganhar in 1997. Yet there is something that binds them optically. It is a trait that cannot be picked from an art school, or acquired later by reading books, watching YouTube demos or mingling with other practitioners. Some creative individuals are born with it, others spend lives yearning for the unattainable flair - magic.

The magic of bringing diverse references, materials and techniques together, in each work so tightly constructed that if one removes a tiny shape/ form/ colour/ mark, the visual unity collapses. It is like pulling out a brick from a brilliantly built building. Robert Rauschenberg and Iqbal Geoffrey are just two names in the long list of artists endowed with this quality.

Afshar Malik and Ahmed Ali Manganhar, employing different strategies, pictorial materials, and concepts have created work that is complex in making and meaning, although the making and the meaning differ in the context of each artist.

Their approaches to image-making distinguish them from each other. In his richly painted and pasted surfaces, Malik favours additive processes, while Manganhar prefers a subtractive sensibility in his eroded outlines and softened structures. However, the core of both artists’ formal solutions and social concerns converges as a viewer extracts references of war, conflict, desertion and destruction. History, preserved in the form of film posters, buildings, costumes, photographs, industrial items and products of visual art, appears repeatedly – and diversely in the two artists’ work.

The link to the past is in no way a romanticised fascination. It reveals inquiry, commentary and critique. Societal, historical and political ideas blend with various references, pieces of paper and a range of colours to produce a comprehensive narrative. Afshar Malik, in his mixed media paintings from 2019, has addressed the issues of violence from an extraordinary lens. Assemblages of the objects of annihilation, such as fighter planes, rifles, revolvers, military jeeps and anti-aircraft guns emerge as if from a museum collection, or tiny models from someone’s possession, in paintings like A ‘Fair’ in Love and War; Danger Craft and Culture; and Aquarium. The story is told in several tongues, some with ancient overtones, others in remote dialects. For instance, in the painting Who is Hero? The Martyr!, a metallic torso (armour) is placed in the middle of two female figures, diffused in treatment but distinct in their connection and connotation with Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene (historic personalities surrounding the body of Jesus depicted in innumerable paintings from the history of Christian art).

The mastery of Malik, whose art practice is spread wide “in different disciplines, including illustrations, cartoon-making, ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture and mixed media,” is evident the way he suggests the content, instead of describing it. A viewer is open therefore to formulate any notions from these richly fabricated visuals. A few characters and articles in his paintings, due to their arrangement, look like stage props. For example, in Behind Every Successful Hunting, the outfits of the past warriors (some emitting smoke from collars; and belonging to varying phases of our history, i.e, Company period, late Mughal era) are put in the fashion of mannequins at a display window. Aiming soldiers, war medals, swords and combat helmets reappear in other work, especially with imagery of ancient Egyptian art, or referring to Roman, Ottoman and Persian periods or Mughal dynasty, like the oil and collage on board, labelled Art of the War of the Art.

Malik favours additive processes, while Manganhar prefers a subtractive sensibility in his eroded outlines and softened structures. However, the core of both artists’ formal solutions and social concerns converges; as a viewer extracts references of war, conflict, desertion and destruction.

The title and detail of this piece signify another aspect of Malik’s aesthetics. If on the one hand it deals with the contradictions of art (hand-coloured page of a newspaper article about the originality of art stuck on the surface), it also reminds one of various versions of battle apparatuses, besides mercenaries from multiple societies juxtaposed on the same (pictorial) field, probably suggesting that the shift in sides is a mere matter of form, rather than a national cause, ideological necessity or patriotic demand. Some decades ago, in a TV interview a retired brigadier who fought a bloody war for his country, was severely wounded, captured and held prisoner of war for many years, was asked if he was putting his life in danger for his nation, faith, people or the commander? The man – a young captain at that time –replied: none of these. He and his soldiers were fighting only to defeat men who were on the opposite side of the border.”

The soldier said hse was clear about his action. However, artists can seldom similar clarity when using subjects such as violence, atrocities and conflict. At home or among friends they may express their firm opinions but in the studio their ideas are beset with doubts. The doubts are like colours, not pure, but a mix of several strands, hence unnameable and unidentifiable, yet attractive to look at for longer too.

One cannot compel a creative individual to remain committed in his/ her pursuit, because the attempt often results in an illustrative product or a propaganda-art piece. Making art is more like having a dialogue with outside (often unbearable) realities with the inner (hidden and unknown) self. So the outcome is often ambiguous – ironically one of the reasons for its survival after the incidents, events, personalities are gone.

Form is the function; a dictum accepted by many artists, particularly since modernism. In Ahmed Ali Manganhar’s body of work (Home and the World) one registers the artist’s magnificent handling of paint that transforms the external (the World) into internal (Home). One sees the remains of once-solid structures, historic constructions and important people turned into ruins – but also enticing patches of paint. One can trace the presence of trees, colonnades, archaeological sites, landscapes of different orientation, small neighbourhoods, faded group photos, aftermath of a party gathering (Jalsa, 2023) and a Punjabi cinema poster of hero and villain raising guns (Sharif Badmash, 2023),. With each image, the painter’s hand (rightly described by one of his contemporary artists as “a magician’s”) takes the spectator to another realm that – borrowing a phrase from Carlos Fuentes – “encompasses the reality of imagination.”

Manganhar confirms his control, facility and intelligence of manoeuvring visible references to infuse a range of meaning not quickly available, thus translating the practical, objective, neutral into personal and poetic; which happens in the work of many artists, who are either ‘truthfully’ portraying a segment of physical reality, or addressing societal, political and global realities. For most of them, what is out there, is merely a stimulus to express something else, profound, lasting.

Paul Cezanne described such a stimulus as a motif; the motivation for exploring visual/ formal dimensions: a frame of thought, followed by generations of artists. Not surprisingly, in the present exhibition Ahmed Ali Manganhar has rendered a hazy mass of a man (inspired from the post-impressionist painter’s work (The Bather, 1885-87), and named the painting After Cezanne!

The writer is an art critic, curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.