"I read, some days past, that the man who ordered the erection of the almost infinite wall of China was the first emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed that all books prior to him be burned".

-- Jorge Luis Borges

Glued to our mobile phones, we hardly notice the world around us as we walk or drive from point A to B. If we did look around, we would not miss walls layered with graffiti, posters, political slogans and quacks’ advertisements. These disclose the fabric of a society. Often, you find interesting collages made out of overlapping messages or torn posters. What remains is an abstract visual, a composition of diverse shapes, forms, colours and textures.

This visual has inspired several artists across the world, including Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villegle. In the recent works of Noor Ali Chagani, one may find a similar fascination but the route is different. Instead of being inspired by the visuals on walls, he has brought walls and pillars to his art. At his solo exhibition, titled The Space Within at Tanzara Gallery, Islamabad -- open from October 15-25, 2019 -- there were sections of brick walls, concrete beams with bare rod structures, and window frames filled with cement.

Like many exhibition venues in this country, Tanzara Gallery is a small space. So the only way to fit walls and construction columns inside a display area was to minimise them.

Chagani was trained to do this as a student of miniature painting in the Department of Fine Art at the National College of Arts. He learnt to reduce figures, landscapes, buildings and objects such as trains, ships, aeroplanes, human beings etc. on a wasli paper that could be held in one’s palm, or picked up with one hand. He employed the same tactics in minimising bricks during his Degree Show pieces in 2008. He produced structures, walls and urban sections, with tiny red bricks. Later, this aesthetic choice led to fabricating carpets, sheets, and folds comprising small brick units.

In this show, all his works, save one, are remnants of his wall works. The artist’s tremendous skill in forging replicas of actual bricks on a small scale makes it hard for a viewer to realise that what he is looking at is not an actual wall but a miniature version; not part of a building, but an art work. Since he has been creating works with these tiny bricks for 11 years, and in every imaginable form and format -- free standing, inside a picture frame, with multiple creases and folds -- the crucial and cruel question is: why he continues with this motif and method?

Chagani is fairly recognised in the art world in and out of Pakistan, showing at prestigious galleries and organisations. Does that create the need for trying something new?

The urge for ‘new’ was spotted when Noor Ali Chagani started to include another building material in his art --in the form of concrete pillars with a mesh of steel bars emanating out of the block. In the recent exhibition, like his last show at Koel Gallery (Grey Spaces, February 13-23, 2018), there were concrete blocks which altered the viewers’ perception of Chagani as an artist stuck with bricks, to one who can use, whatever material takes his fancy and communicates his idea.

Idea? Ah, that long-lost, much-loved word in art that has a peculiar relationship with the practice of artists, especially around us. Instead of wasting time, resources and effort to indulge in new concepts, many artists are content with a stock image, technique or material, without any new inquiry. To a point, Chagani did the same. Small brick became his identity. Perhaps, it is a realisation of this kind of saturation that has forced him to experiment with a new building material, leading to some exciting visual resolutions.

At this stage, his concrete beams are quite like the bricks that he began to explore in 2008, and were joined, twisted, and later folded; almost transforming into words of a familiar vocabulary. One hopes that Chagani is able to handle his new material with a different approach. One saw a glimpse of this shift; the way he moves away from the pictorial pleasure of his material -- heightened with concrete -- and focuses on different dimensions of our urban environment. Apart from buildings in red bricks and structures in concrete, the city reveals other aspects of its existence: writings on the walls, posters pasted on pillars, and graffiti on cement surfaces.

Chagani has incorporated both popular visual imagery and common messages in his wall works. However, a contradiction remains. In a free-standing wall, the part with bricks appears new, clean and intact -- though in the recent exhibition there were a few walls with eroded brick. The graffiti portion too conveyed a sense of time-lapse. The wear and tear is evident in the way the paint fades, posters are ripped, and drips are smeared. This conflict is resolved as soon as Chagani selects concrete as his second material. In our minds, graffiti, wall-chalking and public proclamations in open spaces are never new. Because the moment you finish pasting a poster, painting a slogan, putting a film advertisement on walls, these are ready to receive the effects of atmosphere that make them stale: be it dampness, sunshine, dust, dirt or human intervention.

Correspondingly, a newly laid load of concrete soon starts looking old. These visual solutions, however lead to another issue, about the content and intent of the artist. Is he more interested in the beauty of brick walls and concrete pillars or is he now concentrating on the semiology of what is read on the walls? Or is there a third way?

Looking at the images picked for his walls and pillars, one realises that these messages are directed to the entire community. But Chagani concocts a new meaning by combining election posters, announcement of a Shia mourning session and a skin cream advertisement showing the face of a young female actor on a singular surface. There are more -- the price of bread, political agitation, scandalous proclamations, invitation to join the army, information about getting your flat tyre fixed, details of a sweetmeat shop and slogans of a religious outfit. Once juxtaposed, these portray the real picture of the society where differences of class, morality, politics, religion and nationalism exist.

If the Chinese emperor, Shih Huang Ti, destroyed the books and built a wall to defend against invaders, Noor Ali Chagani has blended the perishable text with the impenetrable walls; so they become passages for the viewers to re-visit what they are, and can be.