Though jokes are often politically incorrect, perhaps this is even more so. An American woman went to a bar at night and drank a lot. On her way home she felt sick and tried to vomit in a waste drum on the roadside. Doing so, she fainted with half of her body leaning inside the drum. A sardar ji walking past by saw her, picked and brought her to his flat. He put her in the bed, covered her with a blanket and told his room-mate: "Bro Gurdas Singh! these Americans are weird. Look at this woman. She could have been of use for another four to five years but see how they’ve dumped her in the drum!"
Some of our artists fit the Sikh’s description of the Americans. They have ideas they could dwell on for a longer period but abandon them in order to pick something else. Thus, in each exhibition, one sees a new series of work loosely joined but not connected in a fuller sense with their other works. Most artists frequently showing at various galleries in the country and abroad create a body of work on a specific idea, employ a particular technique and material, and then forsake it in favour of something new in their next display. Thus each exhibition is a point of departure or quick arrival for that artist.
This approach towards art or image-making is in contrast to the practice of authors for instance. Two Noble Laureates, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Patrick Modiano, said they had been writing the same book, a different version each time! Often characters, situations, atmosphere and content reappear in their novels and short fictions. In much the same way, a number of artists (like Giorgio Morandi, Jamil Naqsh and several others) have been engaged with similar concerns in their works spread over years and in each new piece attempt to deal with the same formal and conceptual issues till they feel they are successful in their quest.
On the other hand, the desire to investigate a completely or partially different subject matter is logical because for some artists, the creative ideas keep changing like their choices in life, opinions, political positions and likes and dislikes, sometimes in entirely opposite directions. Hence in every exhibition, they explore different concepts and acquire new strategies to execute them. This attitude, if not perceived as following a fashion for each new season, could also be understood as a person’s search for new forms of expression.
Ayaz Jokhio is one of those artists who have a bit of both tendencies. Not only his concerns remain the same but in each show of his he surprises the viewer with his unexpected imagery and technique. In the recent past, he has shown works made with collages of newspapers, paintings using dust as medium, tiny canvases in gold frames, and works based upon the link between image and text.
In one of his previous groups of paintings, the artist created visuals of art materials, such as paper, coloured pencil, charcoal, crayon and tube of oil paint etc., each made in the same material. Thus the pictorial matter and substance to fabricate it were in total harmony, reminding of Frank Stella’s famous quote: "Painting is what you see on the surface". Those works signify how the content and form can be combined in a seamless scheme.
In his recent works, this balance is twisted and turned. The seven works from his exhibition, Filling Greys (Nov 17-25, 2014 at Taseer Art Gallery, Lahore) introduces a change in our way of associating two types of ideas or images. Made like children’s drawings, each of these works has a simple title in Urdu or Punjabi; some of these translate into eye glasses, umbrella, car, snake and butterfly, written as if pronounced by a child. The manner of rendering these things as separate entities on a single sheet follows a child’s approach -- to see every object independently placed (a frame of thought that is viewed in the beginners’ drawing preferences by focusing on a single object, like a bottle, flowerpot, cup from the whole composition).
However the work is not as simple as it appears at the first glance; mainly because Jokhio tilts and twists the objects and their links with other entities. The outline of a car contains the view of a roadside seen from a moving vehicle, shape of a clay utensil comprises sunset at the sea, the umbrella is composed of people walking in flood, while the form of a cloud and rain drop reveal the scene of a desert. In the same manner, the shape of glass has a portion of a printed paper (newspaper), the butterfly consists of a page from Garcia Marquez’s short story A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings, and the snake is constructed from a rope.
The link between two diverse items has been a favourite motif of Ayaz Jokhio, with his series of diptychs of bread with earth, pen and missile etc. In the present charcoals on paper, the micro contains the macro; a reversal of the normal order of things.
But not quite so. In our daily lives we often perform this task: sitting inside the aeroplane, through our prayers we try to hold and control the huge aircraft which in reality carries us. Through our small eyes, we look at the vast world. Situations observed by two Urdu poets. Iqbal says: ‘The whole sky is in the dot of my eyes’, and Sufi Tabassum in his children’s poetry proclaiming that: ‘stream is drowning in the boat’. Both verses, one philosophical and the other a playful rhyme, denote how the great poets switched the existing scenario to create a new reality/possibility.
In Ayaz Jokhio’s work, too, one senses the upsetting of ordinary scheme of things. It could be perceived as an unorthodox gesture. But, once prepared as a series of works which are conceived and created with a single frame of mind, even his change of artistic tactics seem like tame innovation, tried and tested several, rather seven, times.