In their new work, Qasim Bugti and Romessa Khan explore memory, nature and the instability of perception
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sense of the unpredictable hangs over the latest work by Qasim Bugti and Romessa Khan, titled Bridging Nature, Matter and Consciousness, at Satrang Gallery in Islamabad, curated by Zahra Khan. The reality here is strictly physical, with no allegorical significance per se. One cannot help but conclude that their latest work is also an attempt to stymie interpretation. Elegantly aloof at first, they speak by way of ellipses and allusions, unfolding in a slow, voluptuous rush.
The artists’ approach approximates a latter-day version of ‘ostranenie’ – a term coined by the Russian formalist and literary critic Viktor Shklovsky in 1917. In his essay Art as Technique, he wrote: “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’... to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” It is perhaps this ‘making strange’ that best explains the peculiar, disorienting pleasure provoked by the exhibition.
Leading as it does into precarious territory, it is no surprise that the artists greet the word ‘beautiful’ with caution. Rows over aesthetics have been brewing in the art world since the publication of Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon, his no-holds-barred defence of beauty. “Any theory of images that is not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder,” he argued, “begs the question of art’s efficacy.” Hickey questioned an unspoken creed by which art that privileged aesthetic pleasure was deemed conservative, uncritical or socially irresponsible. Such art, so the argument continues today, is seen as little more than eye candy or market fodder.
“There are no rules, only concepts” – a dictum that instantly attained the status of ideology. This philosophical assertion has become legendary and could serve as the epitaph, the slogan, of Romessa Khan and Qasim Bugti’s work. If the human condition can be embodied through the creative application of line and colour, the work on show draws strength from a vision of art. The fluid combinations of line and colour suggest the care and precision one would expect from the careful use of ink and watercolours on paper. But here, the expanse of paper delights the viewer less through the act of reading historicised line and more through the experience of time in motion. The artists position their viewers within a temporal field of inner vision that shifts continually between moments of memory, insight, flashback and the subconscious.
Romessa Khan’s work explores the relationship between movement and time and the interplay between conscious intention and the unconscious use of skill and experience. In both form and surface, her work features loose orchestrations of geometry and colour. Seemingly organic forms sprout from a bed of clean marks, threatening to overrun the entire composition with their fungal energy. Vivid accents of red, cyan and orange heighten the impression that these growths are not entirely natural, but rather mutations of some kind.
Khan’s work consists of exercises in style and close attention. She draws with an art-historically educated hand, seemingly undisturbed by a modernist sensibility that might otherwise collapse its fluency or subvert its descriptive power. She favours crowded compositions with a complex interlocking of forms. As a mark-maker with a distinct predilection, she stresses the materiality of her medium.
Romessa does not appear to intend her drawings to be fully decoded. Her artworks function as mind maps, evocations of the silent multi-tasking that takes place inside someone’s head as they interpret the constantly shifting sensory world around them, or attempt to grasp the ungraspable quicksilver texture of reality. She anatomises quotidian forms – a chaise longue, an envelope, a hanger, flowers, tubes, as well as some unrecognisable shapes – and augments them with compulsive loops, suggesting a lovelorn mind in which the everyday is transfigured.
If love cannot be reduced to language, if words are never quite commensurate with emotion, despite heroic attempts such as Roland Barthes’ fragmented devotional A Lover’s Discourse, then this becomes, in many ways, an ideal subject for the artist. She engages with phenomena that resist being fully captured on paper, and creates vertiginous evocations of the chase: a partial, yet overwhelming, informational sublime.
What do we learn from nature, and why are we always drawn back to it? Does it teach us about ourselves through metaphor and example? Qasim Bugti explores these questions in his current suite of work, though in a quiet manner which, inspired as it is by the mute beauty of his subject, does not appear overtly philosophical. Based on the humblest of natural forms – the tree – his work is composed of fragments that suggest broken pieces of trunks and branches, chunks of wood and stripped bark. Spend a little time with these forms and they begin to morph into something else: stone, skin or bone. They bear flesh-like layers that form over one another in an animal way, reminding us that trees grow from the inside out, though Bugti does not seek to mimic this process literally.
Bugti’s distinctive abstract drawings are composed of small, repeated marks that highlight the interplay between presence and absence. Particularly important to his practice is the concept of wabi, meaning ‘simple’ or ‘austere,’ which encourages acceptance of transience and imperfection. Another is shibui (literally ‘astringent’), which refers to simplicity and unobtrusive beauty.
With muted palettes, some of Bugti’s drawings evoke organic forms such as animal skins, the patina of stone, or the surface patterns created by undulating water. From a distance, they appear still and ethereal, their neutral tones exuding tranquillity. Closer inspection, however, reveals surfaces teeming with detail. The marks sit on a translucent ground, creating a gentle rippling effect that recalls murmuration patterns or a crumpled blanket.
Working almost intuitively, Bugti painstakingly applies every mark by hand – an important, albeit obsessive, approach that lends his drawings a fragile beauty. It is also a precarious process, leaving little room for error. Each work becomes an experimental journey, the success of which can only be judged once the final destination has been reached.
The writer is an art critic based in Islamabad