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Contemporary painting appears to be regenerating itself following the last 25 years during which Conceptual Art has dominated the establishment-endorsed avant-garde. The allure of Dada and materials spawned by new technologies appear, however, to be wearing thin, as evident not just in my practice in oils on canvas, but also in the rebirth of the Perso-Indic miniature here in Pakistan, as well as other historic portals to craftsmanship, such as the new Mannerism of John Currin in New York or the appropriation of Spanish Baroque in Jenny Saville’s body of work.
My studio practice gives precedence to questions of aesthetics and the crafting of traditional painting media using mechanical and electronic processes as intermediary “drawing” tools in arriving at the painted image. Painting allows my imagination, intuition and accident to intervene in the crafting of an image, which is thereby an act of pleasure and magic, bringing into existence what it is I want to see – to fill an absence in the world. I paint because it gives me license to stare, to be able to flesh out an idea, emotion, or commit to an image a shadow of the world around me. I paint as a political act: to express my power over power larger than myself and often in conversation with other images, words and music.
Thematically, my body of work has moved from a navel-gazing self-obsession about identity to dwell on issues of death and decay, the colonial encounter, the process of Othering, gender and masculinity, man and nature, urban space, class, and war, among others. Through my images, I seek to tell stories and ask questions about the body and its idealization, the perception and representation of light, the coherence of structure, the psychology of colour, the relationship between text and image, and the limits of the frame.
Some of these concerns arise out of an awareness of the aesthetic discussion created by the revival of the miniature in Pakistan, which I have made a self-conscious choice to not engage as a medium – not least because I find oil paints better suited to stand in for the corporeality they are used to represent, but also because it is an admission to myself and the discourse into which I paint that contemporary Pakistan is closer to its colonial present than its precolonial ‘glorious’ past. This frees me from the bane of searching for what is perforce a constructed authenticity that seeks to articulate a regionally specific voice and allows me instead to reckon with art as a means of making magic to deal with the universal questions that confront humanity.

Lieu de memoire

2005
Oil on canvas
168 cm x 122 cm

Hellbird

2004
Oil on canvas
60 cm x 45 cm

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

2002
Mixed media
60 cm x 45 cm

Contempt

2006
Oil on canvas
90 cm x 135 cm

Narcissus and Echo

2006
Oil, nailpolish and silkscreened text on canvas
85 cm x 100 cm

Posthumous Portrait of Ingres

2006
Oil on canvas
183 cm x 90 cm

Skin

2006
Oil on canvas
183 cm x 122 cm

Rama

2006
Oil on canvas
183 cm x 90 cm

Bully and Bitch

2008
Oil on canvas
183 cm x 90 cm

Body of Work

2008
Oil on canvas
183 cm x 90 cm

Tryst

2008
Oil on canvas
210 cm x 150 cm

Trio

2008
Oil on canvas
90 x 120

View From Bhopal House

2008
Screen print on oil on canvas
225 x 150 cm

Pump Action

2008
Oil on canvas
183 x 122 cm

Nothing

2009
Oil on canvas
183 x 90 cm