Afshar Malik has been a perpetual nomad; travelling between genres, styles, surfaces, techniques and mediums. He takes an object, material, imagery, and transforms it in his peculiar idiom. A miracle was witnessed, recently at his exhibition, The Garden of Love and Otherness, at Canvas Gallery, Karachi (February 1 to 10). His characters, which include men and women, animals, trees, fruits, clouds, water, camera and other familiar stuff, frequently move from one work to next, yet appear unseen, unexpected and exciting – in every new composition.

Even though paintings from his solo show are produced on different surfaces: paper, board, melamine trays, one detects a consistency in image making, especially in the choice and application of varying colours. His palette is vibrant, to the extent of being flamboyant. Malik, a painter and printmaker working for more than 40 years, is now at a stage in his creative life where sheer pleasure seems to be the main impulse for creating art.

His visuals look like photographs of memories rather than of a physical world. Malik is not old, merely 66 and much younger at heart. However, artists are old by nature. They are like aged people who spend hours in reminiscing about bygone times, the incidents and episodes of their childhood, youth, mature years; and bringing them back to life and light. Art by definition is categorised avant-garde, but artists are more inclined to resurrect their past, private as well as collective.

Recollections, whether individual, secret, shared, cultural, or historical have been a starting point for many artists. Personal observation/experience, narrations by someone else, pictorial references from different cultures and continents, are the stock for choosing one’s visuals – as well as to connect with audience beyond one’s studio/epoch.

Malik’s diction seems to have sprung from several sources: family photographs, traces of Indian miniature paintings, popular imagery, European art history, myths. One recognises the figure of Vincent van Gogh’s The Sower in Afshar Malik’s Man Made Man; and some other characters from a hidden archive, like the couple posing together in From a Rain Cloud Album, or a tuba player clad in the uniform of an ordinary (read lower-middle-class) wedding band in Of the Day Here.

In this body of work, Malik conveys the idea that our private memory is neither exclusive nor elusive It includes whatever we see, read, hear, encounter and share with others. As individuals and groups, we reflect and reproduce the fabric of society. Solitary figures and couples are also present in the paintings from his latest exhibition. We can see a white-bearded man holding a glass (I of the Two); another wearing dark glasses and lighting rows of clay lamps (One Day Today); and the sole musician belonging to a troupe (Of the Day Here).

The drinking man seeking his partners; a bandwallah abandoned by his colleagues, the man surrounded by clay lamps, all seem to be seeking others, companions primarily to find out more about themselves. Intezar Husain, in his magnificent short story Aakhri Adami, narrates the situation of a single, the last human amid a community being transformed into animals. Their metamorphosis to another specie makes the surviving soul doubt his own humanness.

We are mirrors to one another. So we see, get confirmation through people around us: through family friends, foes, strangers, existing in real life or from the albums in our minds or in domestic possession. In his work, Afshar Malik constructs this human condition with individuals amid surroundings, situations that end up being valuable after a period of time. They are like physical manifestations of memory. Like a man carrying his daughter in his arms (In his Garden of Eve); a man and woman sitting next to each other (From a Rain Cloud Album); two soldiers posing informally, closely, and affectionately (Love and Regards), a female balanced on the leg of a male, both enclosed by a dreamlike span of blue (One in Balance), a woman submerged in water holding the head of a man (Grey Fog Melody); or two figures of undetermined identity, origin, age interacting with each other in Dog’s Old Master’s Day and Same As We.

Looking at these paintings, which are about others, either recollecting their pasts or reimagining their disappearance; one gleans strands of Afshar Malik’s aesthetic choices. Playful on the surface, these can be more problematic deep down. People who are holding on to each other in a beautified environment, posing in front of a camera, or just being themselves without the presence of a viewer, are still entangled in their intimate acts or settings. One feels that Malik resurrects a bygone world populated by those who could be from anywhere, yet have been found nowhere. Most of us have photographs of our parents, relatives, friends, or of spaces have we lived in or visited once, but Afshar Malik’s work, instead of being a booster for nostalgia, is a dose to decipher ourselves. What we are made of: small, insignificant, forgotten incidents, dreams, or possibilities, which may haunt one at a certain stage in one’s life (not unlike Michel Houellebecq’s protagonist in his novel Serotonin, who at an advanced stage in his life revisits all his abandoned lovers).

Although the works included in Afshar Malik’s solo exhibition suggest some sort of close-up of our past, desire, sensuality, one painting, Eye of the Two, connects the viewer to the artist in a direct, literal – and perhaps lasting way. The image is of a spectacled man focusing on a photo through his handheld camera. When a viewer looks at this work, he reaches a non-man’s land. Caught in a long chain of image-makers – Afshar Malik who produced the painting; the man in the painting who is capturing a snapshot with his gadget; and the viewer who – like the man behind the lens – lifts the shutter of his eye to admit the scene in front of him.

No matter what the imagery refers to, personal, poetic, problematic, one suspects that the works of Afshar Malik offer something extra and extraordinary - his untiring love of life and his urge to connect and communicate with his ‘readers’. There can be several reasons for picking a melamine tray to paint, an object normally not used for creating art; but Malik did work on these household serving trays, turning them into exquisite and intricate collections of an artist’s marks. The presence of these trays in his art signifies something important, and basic – reaching to his public (Malik worked as a cartoonist and illustrator at the beginning of his career). One of the most obvious images is of a fish put on a plate in Small Sad Error; somehow delineating all other works from the show. Visuals to be consumed by connoisseurs – like a barbeque fish – or just the dish.

The writer is an art critic based in Lahore