Many critics and viewers have commented on Shireen Kamran’s ‘childlike’ way of image-making. The adjective makes one bristle. When they write about men in that context, they use words like ‘guileless’ or ‘energetic’ or ‘wilful’, words that have more power to them. Or if they do say ‘childlike’, it’s in a glowing way, not as a pejorative. Using ‘childlike’ is a way of making a woman’s effort seem less of an important enterprise, of not recognising that they have an intellectual premise.

Another critic declared, by contrast, that the most contemptuous criticism of recent paintings comes from those who say: ‘Any child of eight could have done that.’ It is also the most difficult of all judgements to answer, since it involves the recognition, but not the admiration, of an apparent spontaneity of inspiration and simplicity of technique whose excellence we have come to take for granted. Man is a thinking reed, but his great works are done when he is not calculating and thinking. ‘Childlikeness’ has to be restored with long years of training in the art of self-forgetfulness. When this is attained, man thinks yet he does not think. He thinks like showers coming down from the sky; he thinks like the waves rolling on the ocean; he thinks like the stars illuminating the nightly heavens; he thinks like the green foliage shooting forth in the relaxing spring breeze. Indeed, he is the showers, the ocean, the stars, the foliage.

Kamran loves the materiality of paint and how it can act as an uncanny record of time. In her paintings, the tracing -- the pressure of the actual hand -- gives them an imprint, a record of time passing, snail trails. Brush and trowel in hand, she spends hours slowly fleshing out her paintings. Slowly, thoughts embedded in paint take on an existence of their own as the palimpsest of recorded and erased meanings and experiences built over time. Dense and mottled, haphazardly marked and scratched, Kamran’s paintings feel both aged and immediate, with subtle hints of colour, words and thoughts surging just beneath the final skin of paint.

She relishes the way the underpainted strata seep through the top layers of pigment, affecting the colour, vibration, and feel of the finished work. Indeed, she likens the accretions and irregularities of her paintings to human skin with its uneven pigmentation. Painting, to her, is a stand-in for the body. It becomes the host, and that’s part of its conversion. It becomes a host for the spiritual. Good paintings enable us to believe in the palpability of its skin. As Willem de Kooning once observed, flesh was the reason for the invention of oil painting.

In the years following her father’s death, Kamran seems to have used painting as a way to purge old sorrows as she sifted through family belongings and untangled childhood memories. Indeed, girlhood memories have both dogged and inspired Kamran throughout her life. The fascination is reflected in the new series of paintings on show at Rohtas II in Lahore, called Saudade. Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never return. A stronger form of saudade might be felt towards people or things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing, moved away, separated or died.

‘Change is necessary for growth.’ Perhaps these inconspicuous words allude to the many times Kamran’s family moved from one city to another, and she was told by her parents that the change would be good for her. The vague outline of ‘Sweetie’, as Shireen’s father called her in childhood, reappears in her maiden name. Kamran has described him as ‘benevolent’, explaining that she was trying to claim a place for him and to take care of something that was for her some kind of pain or wound. The recurrence of certain images, such as a chair, suggests a healing practice for the artist, an exorcism of sorts. Images are explored until the emotional experience is understood physically and emotionally, and the interior scar gradually heals and disappears.

A lament for the lost continent of childhood, the new series of mixed media paintings evokes Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Just as Proust’s memories -- of youth, family gossip, and a world of his own -- start to flow when he tastes a madeleine dipped in linden tea, so one might conjecture the tide of childhood memories that raced in when Kamran discovered in some closet an old report card or a favourite plaid school dress. Kamran’s paintings represent the adult’s attempt to reclaim the child’s state of innocence and instinctual faith. "Painting is a kind of call and response," she observes.

Artists create for many reasons. Who knows where the impulse arises? But as Kamran has made clear throughout many years of art making, introspection, and conversation, the matter of being alive is something to be investigated. This seed of belief forms the hidden rhizome from which Kamran’s art has flourished. That art has grown and matured through confrontation with the demons in Kamran’s life. One of these is mortality -- and its flip side, the search for meaning and happiness in life.

One of Freud’s most profound insights was that the unconscious does not recognise the concept of age. By that he meant that one may spend a lifetime struggling with issues and emotions acquired in one’s formative years, when any conflict or fantasy becomes firmly implanted in the psyche. This point is worth pondering when considering Shireen Kamran’s work -- how the past shapes a life and finds form as she stands alone her studio, brush in hand. For in many ways, the artist is a clandestine autobiographer, layering thoughts and secrets in her canvases as she crawls through thickets of memory, bores through stratified thoughts, probes for a sense of self as she changes and ages. As Kamran simply states: "Paint is memory. It can hide or reveal."