enerally, drawing a straight line is not considered art; nor for that matter, many lines, including intersecting lines. Most of us have done this at schools and not necessarily in art classes. What raises this elementary exercise to the level of art is the complexity of the vision behind it which comes up with such a strong scheme that a static image exhibi9ts the power to control and direct a spectator’s gaze. The phenomenon is evident in Mohammad Ali Talpur’s imagery, especially in the larger canvases. It has been heightened in New Works, his solo exhibition being held from October 22 to 31, at Canvas Gallery, Karachi.

All artworks included in the show except one (Untitled VI), share two attributes: they are black and white and consist of lines that cover the entire picture plane. For a simplistic mind, there is nothing challenging, daring or different, since these features have occurred in his previous work. However, his recent work is unique in that it cannot be circumcised to mere description. Talpur’s image (to borrow a phrase from a Mexican novelist) “resists reductive definition and encompasses, in a manner that is almost an act of love, all the senses… sight, sound, smell, taste.” His paintings on paper and canvas are labyrinthine. They attract and absorb a viewer’s gaze, hence the entire person.

Today we are used to reducing pictures to handy size. They are printed on paper or seen on a scale compatible with our mobile phones and computers. Many of us mostly access an art exhibition in the form of a PDF file. Faced with Talpur’s new art pieces installed at the gallery, one hardly cares about the difference between large canvases and relatively smaller pieces. The thickness, course and spread of lines changes to compliment the proportions of the surface. The current body of work can be divided into two broad categories. Some of the exhibits represent a minimalist approach and are composed of only horizontal and vertical lines. Others include lines in several directions. This shifts the shades and produces an illusion of movement and perception of space.

The history of picture making (including during the so-called prehistoric era) suggests that the desire to record and replicate the space a human grasped beyond one’s body has been a potent motive: narrow, shallow, wide, extended, flat, layered, domestic, undiscovered, far, near, real and imaginary space – experienced in various positions, levels, situations, moments.

As locations, customs, thoughts, tools, environments, requirements, limitations, exposure, and individual style and shared traditions changed, the appearance of space varied in every imaginable way: from a child’s scrawl of a house amid green fields, red flowers and blue sky to layered constructions of several views in a single Mughal miniature painting; flattened areas of Medieval illuminated manuscripts, rotated horizons in wall drawings by Indian tribes’ women, linear depiction of distance in Egyptian reliefs and frescos, Giotto’s stage-like space, High Renaissance perspective, mechanical rendering of a real site through camera, the melting backgrounds in post-impressionist paintings, to diverse viewing points co-existing in modern art, especially after Paul Cezanne.

Another sense of space is embodied in Mark Rothko’s surfaces. The coats of paint virtually start receding in front of a viewer’s eyes while they are seated/ standing next to the canvas. A similar phenomenon takes place with Talpur’s recent creations. Networks of black lines on white surfaces (and vice versa) advance, retreat, expand, contract, appear near or far away. Their movement is subtle and varied so that the paintings appear remarkably different from one another despite the fact that each has been produced (with acrylic on canvas or felt-tip pen on paper) in an identical palette of black and white, and every surface comprises straight lines. Due to this blend of uniformity and multiplicity, an optical contact with the work results in opening up unexpected scenarios. The journey that begins in a physical act - looking at the monochromatic marks in all exhibits - soon turns inward. It is comparable to the realm of imagination, especially dreams, which we experience with eyes shut, and still enjoy a range of colours and wide and unending fields.

Like a magician or a musician – or some director of black and white cinema, Mohammad Ali Talpur conjures a vast world of possibilities for an unprepared spectator using a limited stock of stimuli. To a person familiar with the history of Talpur’s work, the interaction of web-like lines in strict order is nothing unusual or surprising. Still the way the painter attains another level - precise, perfect and profound - while employing the same vocabulary is intriguing and impressive.

With their simple and plain architecture, the artworks contain a deep, long lasting impact of space. In some paintings, a series of illusions is tied to the viewer’s movement and posture. This aspect emerged in Talpur’s celebrated practice after the artist, quite recently, delved into work that is apparently separate from his regular imagery, method and sensibility. Paintings of found items, smoke drawings of identifiable visuals, addition of three-dimensionality either in material construction or as pictorial components, led him to look at his own art making with fresh eyes. One of the results is Untitled VI, a large painting with two/ twin structures, one on top of another; one made of thin lines of orange, the other with thicker lines in white. In its structure, the form is close to a three-dimensional space, a complex of opened cubes joined in a symmetrical rhyme).

The self-examination must have happened naturally, internally and without engaging anyone else or talking too much. Hence the latest work bears a set of splendid characteristics. Even though it offers a daring and difficult sojourn, the main features of this adventure are soliloquy and serenity (not to be confused with stillness or sombreness). An individual joins the ceremony quietly and continues until he/ she moves out of the gallery. This is like the room housing Rothko’s huge paintings in Tate Modern, where you find a group of people sitting as if invisible and making no sound. Rothko’s content unfolds in such a dense silence that even normal breathing becomes unbearable.

This is also the case with Mohammad Ali Talpur’s latest work. Learning that the painter is a man of few words who always keeps his mobile phone mute and has probably never shouted at anybody furthers one’s understanding of his art.

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