magine the scene: you enter your favourite restaurant, order your regular dish from the menu, but the waiter serves your food alongside its raw ingredients arranged on the side. You are eating, say, ‘mutton with vegetables’, while looking at the chunks of raw meat, peeled peas, pieces of cabbage and capsicum, slices of potatoes, chopped carrots, and portions of salt, pepper, red and green chillies, onions, tomatoes and cooking oil placed next to your plate. I can’t predict the reaction of the majority, but I presume few might enjoy eating their food while having it deconstructed too.

Ayaz Jokhio’s latest paintings are based on a simple yet innovative idea. Most of his canvases, showcased in the solo exhibition Painting of a Palette (3–12 December, Canvas Gallery, Karachi), are split into two halves. One half depicts a resolved and recognisable image while the other features varying colours squeezed out of tubes, in the process of being mixed — resembling a painter’s palette. Actually, not just resembling a palette but serving as one, because the second part of each canvas is used by the artist to prepare the precise shades required to render the main image. Thus, every palette is pictorially and practically connected to its accompanying visual.

The difference between the two sections of every painting lies in the distance from start to finish in the creation of an image. Jokhio’s recent series, in a sense, is more about blending the private with the public; merging the personal with the general; and combining the process with the product. It echoes Arthur C Danto’s reflection on the art of Eva Hesse: “it was the process of making that was central, the key concept, and the product was merely the mode of production.”

In the past, Jokhio has created numerous series, each distinctive in its approach. However, when viewed collectively, they converge on a fundamental point: how an idea can be extended through multiple variations. In this regard, Ayaz Jokhio resembles Claude Monet, renowned for his series of paintings based on subjects like the façade of a cathedral, haystacks, water lilies or poplar trees. For Monet, the individual pieces “only acquire their value by the comparison and succession of the entire series.”

A common feature shared by the French impressionist painter of the late Nineteenth Century and the contemporary Pakistani artist in the first quarter of the Twenty-first Century is their exploration of aesthetic concerns, albeit through different strategies and pictorial materials. For Monet, the sensation of optical contact was more significant than the object (or motif, as referred to in the texts of his time). This focus led him to repeatedly return to the same imagery, maintaining almost uniform compositions while capturing subtle shifts in light and changes in season. In contrast, Jokhio investigates the possibilities of representation through the nature of picture-making, exploring the altered roles of painter and spectator, as well as the differentiation between an image and its interpretation.

In the current exhibition, Jokhio attempts to bridge the gap between intention and chance. The chemistry of each painting synthesises what a creative person plans to achieve with the unpredictable outcomes of the artistic process. When visiting painters’ studios, viewers are sometimes drawn to their palettes, which serve as both a testimony and archive of their preferences in paint, manipulation of medium and handling of brushes — elements often deemed insignificant. While a few artists in the past, such as Jim Dine, have exhibited their palettes as artworks, Jokhio’s comparison and combination of palette and painting is distinct — a conceptual exploration.

A spectator is prompted to reflect on the question: What is painting? Is it the identifiable form completed by the artist, or the white section of canvas used as a palette to fabricate the ‘finished’ picture? Jokhio’s work blurs these boundaries, encouraging viewers to reconsider their understanding of art as both process and product.

This question evolves into an undeniable dilemma in Painting of a Palette, a small canvas in which the palette appears twice: once as the image of an untainted wooden surface in a conventional shape and again as paints mixed to create the form of a palette. This particular work links to one of Jokhio’s earlier artworks, in which, beneath a framed (painted) replica of René Magritte’s This is not a Pipe, Jokhio inscribed This is not Magritte’s Painting. The 2019 piece playfully puzzles over the presence of the actual painting and its author, much like the recent work dismantles the identity and existence of a real palette.

Jokhio’s recent series, in a sense, is more about blending the private with the public, merging the personal with the general and combining the process with the product.

This intertextuality continues in the visuals selected for the new body of work. For instance, in Still Life (Mona Lisa), Jokhio captures the blurred snapshot of a tourist photographing Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting in the Louvre, Paris, following an environmental protest in which mayonnaise was thrown on the artwork. Ayaz Jokhio renders the photograph in a realistic style, constructing a chain of queries about reality and reproduction, originality and imitation. Strangely, the smear of thick edible dressing seems not far removed from the unplanned layers of varying pigments on the left (blank) side of the canvas.

The same commentary on the act of painting and the status of a painter is evident in two other works, Sadeqain and Wall Painter. The former features an enlarged black-and-white photograph of the celebrated artist sitting on the floor, engrossed in painting, juxtaposed with a range of grey and pale yellow paints used as and in a palette on the raw canvas. The latter presents the image of a house painter in a similar posture, with a bucket of colour and a paint-loaded brush covering the exterior ledge of a building. A parallel between the two positions and jobs can easily be drawn, as both figures are “painters” (like Jokhio), engaged in their tasks in nearly identical poses.

The reference to art extends to another work, Still Life (Van Gogh). Here, Jokhio reproduces the Dutch artist’s famous canvas of flowers in a vase, placed near a semi-opened book on a table, and hung on a warm yellow wall. This detailed image occupies the upper section of Jokhio’s canvas, while the lower half is filled with the variety and quantity of paint consumed in recreating the post-impressionist masterpiece.

More than merely reflecting on painting and its metamorphosis, Jokhio’s work explores how reality exists on multiple levels. For instance, a historic site, which eventually becomes a symbol of the past, is composed of elements that are timeless — and, in some cases, region-less. His painting Moen Jo Daro illustrates two interpretations of the ancient Indus Valley settlement: one half depicts the city as it was, constructed with burnt brick; the other half shows the raw materials that may have shaped that civilisation, juxtaposed with the paint tubes the artist used to create the image. This duality reflects a layered understanding of history, materiality and representation.

The relationship between an object and its essence is further explored in Landscape of Pakistan, a topographic vision of the land of the Islamic Republic. The painting represents the geology of the territory — its seas, rivers, green areas and barren terrain – mirrored in the pigments laid out to complete this bird’s-eye view of the country. This reinforces the idea that no matter how exalted a work of art may be, its components are ultimately derived from mundane substances: minerals, plants, stones and dust — all of which contribute to forming the actual (eternal) landscape of a nation-state.

In a group of three canvases, each titled Anagram and numbered sequentially, patches of colours are used as a palette for writing three words: Landscape, Portrait and Still Life at the bottom of each work. These three standard subjects of art are intentionally disarranged, their letters fragmented and rearranged, much like how comprehensible images are deconstructed in Jokhio’s other paintings. The result renders the words indecipherable, challenging the viewer’s perception of conventional artistic categories and their representation.

At a grand exhibition titled 10,000 Years of Luxury (2019, Louvre Abu Dhabi), Cartier presented an ephemeral installation of a perfume in a space designed to allow visitors to glimpse, inhale, and experience the mesmerising scent. During the event, a journalist asked a representative of the fashion house if she could share the ingredients of the fragrance. The expert deftly replied, “Have you ever questioned a painter about the ingredients used in creating a painting?”

In 2024, Ayaz Jokhio answered that rhetorical question by offering the recipe of his painting alongside the artwork itself. This remarkable innovation in art bridges the gap between art and life. It reflects a life shaped by consuming medicines, food items and packaged drinks — all bearing their ingredients and formulae printed on their labels. Jokhio’s gesture transforms art into a transparent and relatable medium, resonating with the contemporary human experience.

The writer is an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore.