One goes to the exhibition of an established artist like Moeen Faruqi expecting to find something familiar as well as shocking. In Faruqi’s recently concluded solo exhibition, both these urges were satisfied, but the artist also went beyond these. I wouldn’t call it profound straightaway, since his imagery deals with and discloses the morbid side of a viewer staring at the paintings from outside.

The outside was Koel Gallery, the venue of the show New Memories, curated by Zeerak Ahmed. In canvas after canvas, Faruqi unfolded the recesses of the mind, or multiple layers of a self, conveniently concealed behind the scaffolding of our daily routine -- going to office, living with family, meeting friends, watching TV, playing a game etc. The supposedly normal acts of life indicate the inner architecture of an individual. The way we move our hands while conversing, choose a certain style and colour for clothes, prefer to speak in a particular language, opt for a specific tone and volume while talking, all reveal a hidden side of our personalities -- all acts that we may not acknowledge but ought to be deciphered for a better understanding of ourselves and our times.

We tend to do the same while approaching a work of art. First, we read the title of the art piece, then try to decode it, bringing the realm of images into the domain of words, and if successful, feel as happy as the commander of an army who has just conquered a country. We feel powerful because as soon as we own the meaning, it is as if we possess the painting. The process has been facilitated by art historians or art critics who, like doctors, dissect an artwork with the scalpels of theory, the knives of references and the saws of history. Often, what emerges out of this intellectual operation is the dead body of the art piece, ready to be put in the morgue of cold print, forgetting what Henry James said, "In the arts, feeling is meaning".

There are others who interact with art in a completely different manner. American novelist Siri Hustvedt confesses: "I do know that I have never loved a painting I can master completely. My love requires a sense that something has escaped me." Her approach is shared by a majority that does not read but recognises, does not translate but remembers, does not analyse but enjoys. Art supersedes the conventions of literalness. Echoing the song of a lark, it reminds one of what they had forgotten, or never had the courage to face full frontal.

Moeen Faruqi provides the grounds to play that game: to play with one’s intimate self -- reflected and manifested in surfaces, rendered in vivid, unusual and unconventional colours. However, for a perceptive viewer, Faruqi’s palette is not a random choice but a conscious plan to convey what he sees in a human being. Strong, pure, almost primitive hues of red, yellow, blue and green are used to construct human forms (‘Portrait of a Man’, ‘Portrait of a Woman’, ‘Faces 1’, 2’, 3’; ‘Portrait 1’, 2’, 3’, 4’). This chromatic scheme does not describe physical features but the layout of the psyche, often as unexpected and unkempt as these combinations. In that sense, Faruqi is revealing what lies behind the façade of every face. These portraits may have been based upon particular personalities but these also turn into signs of a human condition that cannot be named but sensed.

The distance between the eye and mind is crossed in Faruqi’s canvases when you glimpse a man with stark features, in a sparse setting (physical or imaginary), representing the age of discontent, disillusion and indifference, as well as loneliness, which in its essence is not about being solitary but being delinked with one’s milieu, somewhat like Sartre’s proclamation: "Hell is other people" (from the play No Exit). This is repeatedly spotted in Faruqi’s world where a group of men and women are together, yet exist individually. They appear estranged, unsettled and out of place. This state of being is a common thread in Faruqi’s art: of an urban experience in which a man climbing up to his fourth storey flat or walking in a park or doing grocery, smiles to someone who crosses him; but that show of sentiment is as devoid of emotion as Faruqi’s ‘End of our Beginning’ is drained of multiple colours. On the other hand, when the painter introduces a range of strong colours, they portray a set of stiff, hard and ‘de-warmed’ personalities who may go to their banks, schools and shops every morning but never interact with others on an honest, intimate or deeper level.

Today, relations among people are normally predetermined, and so is their association and fixation with ‘things’. Faruqi’s choice of composition - locating these men next to objects - brings this predestined state of human beings into sharp relief. Both humans and other elements are constructed like museum artefacts, with chiselled contours, solid forms, and encased outlines. Gazing at Faruqi’s paintings, one imagines a house with strict order for genders, generations and gadgets.

In his latest works though, you can also detect a new beginning with reference to human representation. Paintings such as ‘Clifton Bridge’ and ‘95 Jamshed Road’ herald a shift in his aesthetics and pictorial tactics. Instead of following a contour line, here the world is liberated from form and survives on the plane of intersecting painterly shapes. A man sits in the centre with a woman and a plate of one banana and two round fruits (probably a sign of sexuality); or is surrounded by two animals and a person placed upside down and another one perched on a chair. All point to not an outside world but the inner landscape of these characters as well as of the onlookers.

Although in some instances, Moeen moves towards the vocabulary of the absurd and the world of dreams (like ‘My Life as a Fish’), but more than these available hooks to hang interpretations on, his work is a means to discover the depth of the human soul or its anxiety while doing nothing. Perhaps, it’s a metaphor of a society made impotent and paralysed in many aspects.

In his work, you ‘read’ the saga of men/women surrounded by elements -- both natural and man-made. Facing the sun, sea, trees, reaching the bed of a river, following a fish, humans are confronting or coexisting in an environment which could have political connotations too. However, Moeen Faruqi chooses a poetic language to create and convey his world or content. Like his painting ‘Rapture Rupture’ reminds one of how poetry reverberates on different planes: personal and public, temporary and eternal, local and universal.

The art of Moeen Faruqi offers all these and more. The fact that he is a poet too provides another road to enter his art. 

(The show remained open from April 9-23, 2019)