Naqsh pays homage to ethereal beauty

Islamabad: An exhibition of art masterpieces by one of Pakistan’s most respected artists at home and abroad Jamil Naqsh opened at Tanzara Gallery here on Thursday.

Titled ‘A Homage to the Ethereal Beauty,’ the show offers a unique collection of incredibly beautiful paintings that reverberate messages of love, hope, peace and tranquility. Described as a ‘Painter’s Painter,’ Naqsh has worked with various artistic themes. However, it is his favourite one of woman and pigeons that he has explored and reinvented in myriad new ways.

Commenting on the works, the gallery’s director Noshi Qadir highlighted how Naqsh’s muted palate, in warm sepia tones, gives impressions of aged works on paper. “These life-size canvases have an extraordinary quasi sculptural quality that they almost seem to invite one to touch them. He renders them with great dexterity and possesses that exceptional inherent sensitivity in the power of his strokes,” she saod.

Beautiful isolated females accompanied by pigeons are portrayed as icons that speak the commonality of universal human sentiments—a collective language that crosses all barriers and offers the viewer a glimpse of the familiar, the domestic, and the soothing.

Eminent art critic Aasim Akhtar described Naqsh’s paintings as presenting “an intimate theatre of forms melting, forms disintegrating, forms kneaded into soft tactility, forms slumping like soft sculptures or inflated into tumescent shapes, tantalizingly enigmatic, buoyant enough to levitate or rest weightlessly, ominous in their lightness. Many of his forms appear in a close-up against a dream-screen but they do not lose their palpability like things held too close to our eyes to focus, or flatten out like images pasted on to an undifferentiated surface.”

Naqsh holds a key position in a expanding the art world. His works arouse awe and admiration at the same time.