Mohammaed Ali Talpur, The space between you and me
Mohammad Ali Talpur is a classist for several reasons, not limited to his preference for black and white. It is primarily his approach towards the act of artmaking. For him, it appears, art is a process of editing, which he practices vigorously on varying levels. From his canvases, he excludes colours, references to the outside world, social and political commentary and all immediately-understood content. What remains is a collection of black lines - innumerable - composed in various schemes on white surfaces.
One may describe his approach to work as minimalism, or op art, but often what unfolds in front of the viewer is solid, sensuous, engaging and enticing. Art is essentially a pact between the viewer and the maker. It often entails deception, disorientation and disruption. What you look at is not always what you perceive or grasp. For centuries, the public has been interacting with paintings, no matter if created in the Medieval Age with an emphasis on description; or from the Renaissance, which produced incredible and believable illusions; or by the impressionist artists, who strove to capture light.
Actually in every work from these periods, what a person comes across are a few pigments fixed to a board, paper or canvas with the help of brush; yet everyone accepts that they are seeing a female figure (Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci), Emperor Shah Jahan holding a flower (Mughal miniatures), Moses bringing the Ten Commandments to Israelites (medieval manuscripts), a bunch of yellow flowers in a vase (Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh) and so forth.
Gazing at these distributions of colours, lines, shapes, volumes, one is led to find meanings, connections, context in these surfaces. So in a sense, the creator of the image, like a magician, can successfully hid from the spectators what is present before their eyes. They have to engage in detecting, deciphering, identifying, admiring and associating with all that is not there - in material manifestation.
The best illustration for the process is perhaps the reading of fiction. What a reader holds in his/ her hands are a number of pages bound together, with words printed in a sequence. The simple arrangement of letters - black marks on a blank or pale-white sheet - takes a reader to unknown and faraway lands, with events unravelling in different situations, centuries; often in the world of imagination, psychological conditions and mythological arenas. Hence a book is accessed on three tiers: recognising alphabets composed in specific order and printed in dark ink; reading about what takes place in the lives, times and places of distant/ unfamiliar characters; and extracting the inner motives, emotions, desires, dejections, failures - not directly mentioned in the text.
All these levels are activated in the art of Mohammad Ali Talpur at the same instance. In his new work (currently on display at Grosvenor Gallery, London, from October 5 to 18), one is aware of the artist's meticulous placement of vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines on canvases which are larger than the average human scale. In these pictorial spaces constructed by Talpur, the precisely produced and placed stripes create a feeling of being there as well as somewhere else. The visible often becomes invisible, or ignorable, since you can't really register each and every line, without having a vertigo of blur, distortion and deviation. Here, knowledge and sensation are at odds with each other. What I know is not what I witness and what I gather is not what I observe. Perspective devised in the age of Renaissance also dealt with this dichotomy. A traveller is aware that the poles on a bridge are of identical measurement but they appear to be varying size when viewed from a fixed point. The same posts seem smaller, thinner and diffused from a far.
What happens naturally - in fact, due to the mechanics of our optic apparatus - can be managed by visual artists. A person can see moving, receding, bulging shapes painted on a flat surface. This is like the experience a visitor to Tate Britain may have in the presence of Bridget Riley's acrylic on canvas (To a Summer's Day, 1980). The information of wavery bands of relatively connected hues put on a flat background becomes a speculation, because what is revealed is a semblance of a perpetual motion. The tension between what is still and what is reverberating arguably is the main concern of the British artist.
Talpur's new paintings are of a similar vocabulary. The artist's preference for formal aspects demands that one negotiate with his work in a certain way: personal or societal. Surrounded by a large canvas by Talpur (7x6 feet), you are lost in the web of lines. It takes you in, occupies you and for a moment makes you forget your presence, even your existence. For a nano-second you levitate and are transported through your eyes into a state of overwhelming commotion, managed by mechanical and complex constructed compositions.
At his solo exhibition for Grosvenor Gallery, Mohmmad Ali Talpur is showing two formats. Small works in ink on paper and large canvases produced in acrylics. In the former, the interpolation of perpendicular lines, slight bends of repetitive marks into horizontal direction, a pronounced shift in angles and a sensitive use of tone invite you to come closer, adjust your near-sight spectacles, in order to access the mystery hidden behind thin lines, which grips your gaze, eyes and mind. A similar reaction awaits you in his large canvases. Though they do not demand a closer contact, they envelop a spectator into a momentary hallucination. Looking at his work, one recalls the German theorist Hans Belting's observation, that "In German, for example, Bild is used for both 'image' and 'picture'. Though people are not talking about the same thing, they are nonetheless using the same word. Some authors create the impression that images circulate in disembodied form, which is not even true of images in imagination and memory, for they, after all, colonise our bodies."
The present collection of Talpur also colonises our bodies and minds. It makes us forget our tangible surroundings and transposes us to an atmosphere of the sublime - a mirage - momentarily though. However, the question is: why should one look beyond one's immediate reality? Why mediate between your physical presence and your visual engagement, and why to focus on the air between you and me, in that in-between space?
There could be many explanations and interpretations, ranging from personal and poetic to art-oriented, but there could be another clue, connected to local conditions. For a person living in today's Pakistan, working at a public institution, supporting a small household, managing commercial exchanges, coping with the increasing atmosphere of alienation and hostility, probably the only solace is to disappear into uncertainty.
Mohammad Ali's work is an example of how an individual focusing at precise shapes, exact boundaries and defined areas can still manage to find a no-man's land between the physical reality and its perception, between conformity and its inquiry, between authenticity and ambiguity. In that sense, possibly the real content of Mohammad Ali Talpur's art is to deconstruct the authority of perception, because for him - like Belting, "The 'image', however, is not defined by its mere visibility but by its being invested, by the beholder".
