According to D.H. Lawrence, "Form is the outcome, not of artistic conscience, but of a certain attitude to life. For form is not a personal thing like style. It is impersonal like logic." In that sense, stylistic differences in the works of Ijaz ul Hassan -- in an oeuvre spread over 60 years -- are all variations of form. His recent paintings and prints are a testimony of what the artist sees.

In English language, interestingly, the words ‘see’ and ‘say’ are similar in sound and syllable (the German words for see and say are sehen and sagen). This indicates that what we observe is ‘recorded in words’ in our mind and we utter what we have gathered through our eyes. In the art of Hassan, the merger of seeing and saying is evident in the way reality is presented, rather re-presented, and turned into a meta-reality.

This larger-than-life reality is evident in his solo exhibition, New, News, Newest at Canvas Gallery, Karachi, which consists of paintings on canvas and prints on panaflex. On the surface these may seem like two different methods, yet there is uniformity in the way the artist has approached them in terms of the world we live in and which lives within us. In the middle of our living rooms we watch two worlds: one on television, which usually broadcasts news and political talk shows; another the view of a tree at different times of the day through the window, a plant with moving shadows like in ‘Coconut Palms’, and ‘View Through a Window’. Nature is caged in our windows, hence turning into a spectacle for us.

A number of Hassan’s paintings are about the act of seeing the spectacle and speculating the reasons behind the phenomenon. The images refer to a mother crying next to portraits of children who lost their lives at the Army Public School during a terrorist attack (‘Massacre of Innocents’); or a man beating his chest at a political procession (‘Lamentation II’); or the face of a fanatic in his full ferociousness (‘Fitna’); along with two paintings which indicate the silhouette of a single figure or two who are either on the verge of an indecision (‘Doraha’) or caught in the act of scheming (‘Conspirators’).

In most of these paintings, Hassan appropriates pictures from print and social media, and transforms them into sensitive surfaces with a sophisticated and strong painterly language. This body of work harks back to his ideas and association with ‘ready-made’ visuals. Popular imagery of posters, political slogans on city walls, information about local wrestling matches, visual updates on dance and musical performances were assimilated in his paintings in the 1970s. Besides paintings, his new prints have their genealogy in TV channels, only because now we live in a world that is tuned to and dependent on different stations for ‘truth’. In actuality truth is not found; it is just a version or variation, modulated and manipulated according to the plans and strategy of political powers and commercial interests.

In these television transmissions, one feels, the entertainment industry is modifying crucial and cruel reality into something ornamental. Recognising this, Hassan uses pictures from the media -- clippings of kidnappings, talk show figures, headlines and details of news text. He captures snapshots of a moving image from the media in such a way that it punctures the sense of solidity in these ‘photos’. Faces, figures, words are unsettled, yet one can identify sentences from breaking news, certain newscasters, political commentators and leaders or the format of a particular programme within these shredded segments.

The suspended space between reality and illusion is perhaps the main content of the artist. He is conscious that a reality projected through media is transitory, since it is wiped out soon, replaced and reversed the next day. So like the dictum of Andy Warhol that "everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," every news item survives approximately 15 hours and then disappears.

Apart from being a critique of our times, these prints of Hassan also disclose the hand of a painter who has spent almost 60 years arranging colours; so the work regardless of its genesis in electronic media affirms a painterly sensibility, possible only for an artist who has observed the outside and the inside; the Nature out of his studio and the paint on his palette. A painter not just puts colour on his canvas, he ‘invents’ a new pictorial sensation through combining different hues, either next to each other or on top or through the absence of some.

Hassan’s aesthetics are evident in the way he selects an image, crops it, and changes it; a strategy that reminds one of Abstract Expressionism, Chinese paintings and Op art; and also connects to his printed collages from 1990 in which he had overlapped the excessive and discarded pages (according to the printing press) of his book Contemporary Painting in Pakistan.

What he makes here is indigenous and original. But as we are not a singular atom but a blend of multiple other segments, features, habits, characteristics, trainings, influences without being aware of their presence, we as artists also enrich ourselves through looking into the art of the world, instead of being confined to a studio. In a lecture on Shakir Ali once, Ijaz ul Hassan had defined artists as thieves who pick whatever they like, so that they can use it later. Artists modify others’ works in a way that one can trace the link but ultimately they become the artists’ own voice.

Ijaz ul Hassan transforms what he finds, i.e fact into fiction, because fiction in the end tells more truth than fact. V.S. Naipaul observes: "Non-fiction can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies". Likewise, the work of Hassan reveals the true state of our beings akin to a mirror we tend to look at to discover our features. Interestingly, the glowing screen of a TV is close to the glazed surface of a mirror. Thus, today’s TV aptly constructs our image; although it requires a person like Ijaz ul Hassan to investigate it, analyse it and incorporate it to portray our reality. A reality not different from what was described by Italian painter Giorgio Morandi in an interview from 1990: "I believe that nothing is more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see. We know all that we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exist as we see and understand it."

(The show opened on April 23 and will remain on till May 2, 2019)