For a seeker, a collection of books can be an allegory for one’s movement from darkness towards light. Arif Hussain Khokhar’s black and white series of works titled Remnants on show at Koel Gallery, Karachi, can be viewed through this aperture, as impending knowledge is always a pathway to light.

His idiom is non-realistic, non-descriptive, and the artist himself is absent – what makes it non-figurative. Khokhar is either a seeker who appears lost in space looking for an anchor or an arriviste searching for an explanation that could apply to his ongoing fumble for meaning in infinite space. According to him: “My work explores the satisfaction that lies beyond completion through a reversal or distortion of the process of making… Thus, the work continuously transforms and the process of creating becomes endless.”

The work serially presents an open structure in space, as if speaking out in a voluminous silence. Khokhar’s absence is poignant in his paintings/drawings, for as a seeker he is always present before ‘something’ observing, deeply unfolding his perception a little while later with his decisive tools on canvas or paper.

Khokhar works with oil pigments, charcoal, crayon, water and emulsion smudging on his two-dimensional surface, yet he does not allow the grid to precipitate as a dominating form/structure in his work, for Nature cannot be restored within a grid. His forms and spaces are lucid and abide by his reflections on Nature. One always feels that he is in a close contact with subliminal space — may it be oblivion. Khokhar influences in depth the rugged and the tender, the vast and the minute, the voluminous and the narrow as persuasive qualities of his work. He diligently imports the fine pores as a vast surface texture to represent water, and austere patches as disturbing facades of the roadside un-organised settlements.

In his drawings, life dwells in the little deliberations of distance and intimacy. This creates abstractions of the recognisable world around. Like on a dark wall, scratches and gaps make their presence vocal, Khokhar paints the significance of each while dismantling the character of a wall as an opaque surface. He attempts to represent the invisible or the unseen that surrounds us – like air or sound vibrations that gather distances and voids into designated corners of home and being.

Khokhar’s earlier practice is figurative; gradually Nature enveloped his figure, or the figure vanished in the midst of a landscape. This shift from ‘figurative-descriptive’ idiom to ‘abstraction’ has mapped his journey from graduation in fine arts to master’s in visual arts at the National College of Arts, Lahore. Coming from Larkana, Sindh, the artist decided to isolate himself from material pretensions of flesh and stone and chose to remain an observer before the calm strength of Nature. Khokhar’s ongoing series since 2018 has been a doorway that impels his inner consciousness of being with the minimum. One can observe how willfully the artist’s hands work upon forms with scratches, smother and confiscate to liberate the indignant black from white. Yet, the possibility of an accident always tempts him. An accidental effect always surprises him and is often the source for a new journey.

Like in Torkwase Dyson’s work, “each painting’s composition is agitated, vigorously asymmetrical and willfully unbalanced. Prudently wrought in tones of black, white and grey, (Khokhar)’s nonpictorial vocabulary is subjected to destabilisation, repetition, multiplication, rotation, and obstruction.”

Subject matter notwithstanding, Khokhar’s revitalised approach to this distinctive art form is radical. Holding steady to certain prescriptions, the artist brandishes his renegade flair by reinventing other aspects of the tradition. Accumulated coats of pigment and charcoal create a mélange of tones and textures that attest to the artist’s skill and prescience. In Khokhar’s works, every layer has apparently been sanded to an atypically matte sheen in quest of a seamless finish.

A collection of opaque black and cloudy grey geometries floats in the paintings’ middle ground, while organically contoured spills, splatters, and streaks mitigate the hard edges. The implied animation of the work is dynamic and multidirectional. Nothing slows down, not even those diagrammatic lines. Speed is what unifies Khokhar’s varied formal vocabularies and imparts an accelerated anxiousness to the paintings. Yet the brisk execution of the new work also forsakes meaningful encounters with surface variation and conflicting materialities. Gently embellished in tones of grey, Accidental Remnants epitomises this body of work’s pensive bent while Born Remnants pictures a wall that seems to be wasting away, its magnificent mass elegiacally disintegrating into loose dust.

An organic array of pigment strata, dispersed ink, schematic black lines, and graphic dashes perform a delicate dance across the page, overlaying and fencing in a large, washy inkblot. The formal relationships at work in the prints are as tactical as those set up in the abstract paintings. Born Remnants contains patterns of vertical brush marks and inky stains. But the prints’ intimacy and fastidious execution offer viewers a slower and richer interpretation of abstraction’s ability to convey the power struggles inherent in movement and displacement. While representational painting may more directly illustrate narratives, Khokhar’s decision to instead deploy formal arrangements directs our attention toward the political potential of shapes and patterns.

While talking about David Schutter’s work, Ara Merjian explains: “Few artists over the last century have ventured to travesty the work of an earlier painter while remaining faithful to the original image’s mechanics, mood or general charisma. There are some relevant exceptions, perhaps most notably Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning. But while Rauschenberg’s defiant gesture was an entirely subtractive one, Schutter’s paintings generate their own pictorial spectacle as much as they eclipse.” In Khokhar’s case, even though erasure forms an almost essential component of mark-making and its deletion, in place of veiling additions through assured application of line, multiple absences are formed by an obsessively measured accumulation of marks. Spontaneity and individuality give way to a resolutely non-expressive interruption of the integrity of the canvas’s surface. Representation, while consonant with traditional image-making, is revenant. Its appearance is immaterial, at once replete with significance and void. The result is an accumulation of marks: textural fragments falling short of any definitive interpretation that bestow passing lustre but are ultimately misleading.

Lastly, what Zhang Dainian explains in his book, Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy, may relate to a better understanding of Arif Hussain Khokhar’s oeuvre: “In popular parlance qi is applied to the air we breathe, steam, smoke and all gaseous substances. The philosophical use of the term underlines the movement of qi. Qi is both what really exists and what has the ability to become. To stress one at the expense of the other would be to misunderstand qi. Qi is the life principle but is also the stuff of inanimate objects. As a philosophical category, qi originally referred to the existence of whatever is of a nature to change. This meaning is then expanded to encompass all phenomena, both physical and spiritual. It is energy that has the capacity to become material objects while remaining what it is. It thus combines ‘potentiality’ with ‘matter’.

The writer is an art critic based in   Islamabad.