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he Urdu phrase arz-o-sama, can refer to earth and sky as well as everything in the universe, implying infinite diversity. Within this setting, one can also imagine the day-night cycle, which is repeated ad infinitum or as a sort of metaphor for the temporality that defines the human perception of the natural world.
Can this temporality be harnessed - through illusion, observation, light, gesture or movement - to a singular moment? For hundreds of years, European artists have wrestled with these vexing questions. This exploration has not gone unrewarded. By the time landscape painting, once a largely neglected genre, came to be recognised as high art, the geography of the land and society itself had undergone a transformation. The trends in art that followed the rise of industrialisation and modern cities in Europe also altered our understanding of time, speed and their relationship with nature. Rather than the earth and the sky, man-made wonders began to define the land and its representation in the arts.
In other parts of the world, the question continued to yield painterly expression and aesthetic possibilities that charted their own trajectories. These, too, added to the canon and conventions of landscape painting. Paintings in many parts of the non-West generated discourse pertaining to landscape and the capitulation of nationhood. Some of this experimentation came to be tied to a definite relationship with land, region and identity. For painters in this region, arz-o-sama carries spiritual and metaphysical overtones. Mughees Riaz has spent more than two decades exploring and expanding on the nuances of this relationship. His interpretation of the arz-o-sama is not a mere homage to the natural wonders and geography of the landscape in his region. Instead, it has evolved to encompass a broad spectrum of ideas.
Some of Riaz’s work raises cogent questions about the human condition. In light of the fierce debates recently regarding climate change and the extractive processes defined by greed, this works need to be revisited for its relationship with the ecology. In that sense, this retrospective is timely and highly relevant. His recent exhibition at Ejaz Gallery Lahore, (Dil Durya: 25 Years of Creative Excellence) featured more than forty visuals executed in oil and charcoal. The narrative behind the curation, by Prof Dr Rahat Naveed Masud and Amna Pataudi, consistently evokes references to cultural roots, topography and ancestral ties to the land and culture.
A portion of the exhibition space has been allocated to artistic and intellectual contributions of some members of Mughees Riaz’s family. The display is in the nature of an autobiographical narrative that pays homage to a genealogical legacy of artistic genius. Narrated through personal archives and artefacts that span generations, the family legacy embodies the spirit of continuity through generations since independence and Partition. The cultural contributions of his father and uncles, in the service of the nation and industry, are represented by visual and material objects. A maternal great-uncle hand-painted film posters and portraits of famous political figures such as the Quaid-i-Azam and Fatima Jinnah. One of his uncles, Muhammad Latif, a graduate of the Mayo School of Arts, trained in the UK, was the first designer of postage stamps of Pakistan. His father, also a graduate of the Mayo School, too, received training in London. He then returned to Pakistan to look after the painting and photography department at the NCA. Certificates, books, photographs, film posters, sacred objects: the contents resurrect the spirit of a time when national pride and identity were sacrosanct despite precarious circumstances. A notable object on display is a hilya belonging to one of Mughees Riaz’s ancestors, who migrated from Abadan in Iran. It is in the form of an elaborate handwritten manuscript that carries a vivid portrait of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
Riaz’s initial fascination with working plein-air was revealed as a student at the University of the Punjab when he chose to paint the River Ravi in its quiet grandeur. Rather than imbuing it with the dusty tones and foliage of the Punjabi landscape painting tradition that offers a more realistic sensory experience or celebrating the verdant pastures of the Punjab as subject matter, Riaz forged his own expression that has come to be recognised as his signature style.
Over the years, his view of the quiet grandeur of River Ravi, sometimes with lonesome buffaloes or solitary pairs/ groups of crows, has evolved to incorporate other threads and themes. However, his primary subject matter remains tied to a distinct expression and distillation of colour as being evocative of mood and atmosphere. A lay viewer may conclude that Riaz has devoted himself to painting nature and the mundane reality of life on the sparsely populated banks of the Ravi, where the flow of time is slow. His style borrows from realism with its emphasis on detail and observation of nature. However, Riaz has continued to experiment and expand his stylistic vocabulary. He has not shied away from pushing his own boundaries and has assiduously mined and dissected his own visual vocabulary to comment on the passage of time, memory, culture, the gaze of the other and economic disparity.
He has also maintained an ardent fascination with building colour spectrums that best capture the quiet mood and dusk of rural Punjab. Experience has enabled Riaz to study and acquire a mastery of tonal variation. There is hardly a view the Ravi that it is not cloaked in an incandescent glow of ambiguity and the silence of a pregnant pause. A frail yellow sun is often set against shades of periwinkle blue, mauve and violet. As the eye inevitably travels vertically as well as horizontally, it cannot bust admire his painterly skill that seamlessly builds and blends tonalities of light and colour. Some of his paintings from the Sunset Series show landscapes and water suffused in a misty haze. The colour spectrums range from pearlescent hues to subdued layers of mysterious cornflower blue light. Land and the limpid surfaces of water blend and blur quietly. There is an almost hallucinatory consistency that sets the stage for contemplation: moods and palettes slow down time to a languid, almost languorous pace and train the eye to capture the terrain as land, water and sky converge and dissipate.
Other paintings pay homage to many landscape painters who have inspired the artist. One can, for example, identify some elements of style gleaned from Khalid Iqbal. Paintings such as Gypsy Huts at Ravi River and 14th August, for instance, are reminiscent of Khalid Iqbal’s studies of gypsy huts on the outskirts of the city. The sweeping diagonals of leaves and solitary trees swaying in their rhythm in compositions like Window 4 and Tree of Love will also resonate with students and academics interested in Khalid Iqbal’s legacy. A series that features unusual juxtapositions; cats, chairs and dogs set against the backdrop of the banks of the River Ravi is oddly reminiscent of Colin David’s interest in design and balance as subject matter.
Apart from Riaz’s signature landscapes of dusk and the River Ravi, the retrospective is replete with series of work showing unexpected breakthroughs. Riaz has taken several motifs from his paintings and expanded on their conceptual and aesthetic possibilities. The presentation and display of the series titled Portraits of Buffaloes, for example, is unique. Arranged in a grid, it depicts small portraits of buffaloes in profile. The size of the frames is identical and the background of each portrait consists of gold leaf. The aesthetic style and repetition initially evoke vastly different art-historical references that range from paintings in profile of Mughal emperors who are nimbed in halos; Company School paintings of typologies and professions; Byzantine icon paintings of revered saints; and Renaissance-style profiles of noblewomen and generals. The notion of the sacred and colonial subject (Company School) is then contested and supplanted by a reverence for the buffalo: a curious combination where one stops short of chuckling at the pun because the painterly skill and realism are meticulous. Each buffalo is unique. Whether it is the droop of an eye, ageing of the face or the riverine paths of veins, it is the tender painterly treatment of contours and body that compels one to consider the beauty of the animal not as an other but as a fellow being. A series executed in charcoal that combines both crows and buffalo in profile, also echoes a similar sentiment.
Riaz’s figurative series critique the concept and stigma of being the other by painting burqa-clad women and bearded men who face the viewer in various poses and settings. In many compositions, they are painted against flat backgrounds: isolating them from context, setting and cultural stereotyping. Riaz humanises them with their vulnerabilities intact. In one of his paintings, Riaz combines all the motifs that define his visual vocabulary by presenting a cropped view of buffaloes, women with covered heads and crows in profile. It is an exercise in harmony and a summation of his skill. The eye moves rhythmically and traces the outlines of figures, his mastery over separating the hues of black amidst textures of fur, feathers and fabric is amazing.
Many of Mughees Riaz’s landscape paintings feature the hazy outlines brick kiln chimneys billowing smoke. Much like Turner, Monet and other impressionists who had painted - even romanticised - the skyline of industrialised London in the 19th Century, Riaz has painted both beauty and the perils of living in a poisoned environment. The mundane observation may not have mattered when these paintings were first done, but today, with smog as a familiar menace, these details are worth thinking about. How have our skies transformed over the years? Why do dwindling waters of the River Ravi resemble an apocalyptic explosion of refuse, plastic, waste and excrement? Retrospectives such as this one are not only seductive for their appeal and scale they also generate meaningful discourse when they collide with the anxieties and contradictions of our present.
Dil Darya: 25 Years of Excellence, a retrospective show of Mughees Riaz’s work, opened at Ejaz Art Gallery Lahore May 22 and remained on display till June12.
The writer is an art critic, art historian and visual artist currently teaching at the Department of Cultural Studies at the National College of Arts, Lahore.