Mohammad Iqbal's Eyes & Circles

 

“There is something about circles
The Beloved likes.”
Circles – Hafiz

You are in Dhaka’s more salubrious district of Dhanmondi. Innocently, and with slight trepidation, you follow Bangladesh artist Mohammad Iqbal up a flight of unprepossessing wooden stairs. As you enter his atelier you are greeted with one of his superb figurative paintings covering most of the wall before you. In truth it is taller than you and stretches to the length of you lying down (twice). It is mostly blue. The painting’s creator is smiling. The doctorate-holding artist understands the effect that his painting must be having on a first time visitor. Frankly, it takes your breath away. It’s the size; the subtleties of colour, the eyes of five conjoined faces that gently gaze at you as you enter, a hint of longing in their eyes. There are no obvious circles in this painting, save the dark circles of irises (limbal rings) of the painting’s well-defined, and oversized, eyes and faces.

In a recent exhibition (his 45th solo exhibition) at Gallery Kobe Hankyu, Kobe, Japan (known for showing Japanese artists such as Tadanori Yokoo), Iqbal presented thirty-two new paintings, acrylic and oil on canvas. It was a series titled ‘Holy Circle’, began in 2010. Iqbal’s former association with Japan includes the gaining of a PhD (in Fine Arts) from Tokyo University of the Arts, and the numerous exhibitions he has shown there. Japan is a draw to the artist. It is a utopia of intimations concerning Iqbal’s use of imagery, aside from those that are drawn from his home country, Bangladesh.

The visitor to Iqbal’s atelier will notice the obvious Japanese obsession with overly large eyes, such as those of neglected and impoverished children, with whom Iqbal has a particular interest in depicting. Everywhere in Iqbal’s figurative paintings oversized eyes are seen, such as in the series ‘Expression’. One such is ‘Expression 5’ (painted in 2018) with a close-up of a head, predominately in black with highlights of red. It is an oil wash with acrylic and oil on Japanese ‘Washi’ paper (Wa meaning 'Japanese' and shi meaning 'paper') with large, lugubrious eyes reminiscent of descriptions by Charles Dickens or his Japanese equivalent Natsume Sōseki. Enlarged eyes is a characteristic of Japanese modern visual graphic culture and has it been (successfully) argued that Japanese manga (comics) and anime (animations) derived their distended eyes from the great Japanese visual artist and film-maker Osamu Tezuka who, in turn, owes a debt to Walt Disney.

The size of eyes in the modern visual culture is not a Japanese longing for eyes like Westerners, as you might think, but a device enabling the artist to better convey meaning and a wider range of emotion for characters through the use of overly large eyes. Cicero (106-43 B.C.) once said, 'Ut imago est animi voltus sic indices oculi' (the face is a picture of the mind as the eyes are its interpreter), and the prominence of larger than natural, soulful, eyes in the works of Mohammad Iqbal is reminiscent of Cicero, of Japanese modern visual culture and perhaps a nod to the graphic fish-shaped, oversize, eyes found in Basholi paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries around India’s Jammu and Kashmir.

In creations such as Iqbal’s ‘Dreaming of a Safer World’ series, the artist has painted enlarged eyes in the foreground figures, giving an air of melancholy to his images. At times there is almost blankness as in a dreamer recently awoken, not with bleariness but a slight pensive perplexity that is yet to transform. In the third of the series there is sadness. The first head (of three), above a predominately white abstract form, seems close to tears. The other two characters try to mask the trepidation in their eyes but succeed only in rendering abject meaning to their faces.

Throughout the years, Iqbal has given his eager audiences canvases a plenty and eyes a plenty including his 2018 series ‘Silent Revelations’ where his customary, yet impressive, ‘portraits’ ‘reveal’ a range of emotions through much larger than life faces and eyes which are at times mournfully expressive. Some ‘portrait’ faces are as large as the artist and require a stepladder to paint. Iqbal, because of his interest in portraying a wide range of emotive figures, has spent time with the people on the fringes of society, such as ‘Bauls’, and learning about their spiritual Bengal mysticism. He captures the faces of these rural dwellers in his series ‘Journey of the Mystics’, often using mixed media on Japanese paper. The beginning of this series was shown in Gallery Chayamachi, Osaka, Japan in 2015, while the series continued into 2016 with ‘Journey of the Mystics - 7’, now held in a private collection in Bangladesh.

Bauls, according to UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) are ….   
“…mystic minstrels living in rural Bangladesh and West Bengal, India. The Baul movement, at its peak in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has now regained popularity among the rural population of Bangladesh.”

Earlier I mentioned ‘Limbal Rings’, circles of eyes. In his latest Japanese exhibition (‘Holy Circles’), with a meme developing since 2010, Iqbal has continued and expanded from octal expression to the more overt use of circles or rings prominent in his paintings. It is no coincidence that Iqbal’s ‘circles’ are brought back to the land of Zen Buddhism and Japanese notions of a drawn visual symbol (ensō (円相,’Circular form’, ring or circle).

Ensō, as it appears in the Japanese symbolic form, is frequently not entirely closed unlike the circles in Iqbal’s paintings. In this sense ensō remains imperfect, symbolizing the perfect beauty of imperfection and allowing for movement or development. A closed ensō circle is perfect, the ultimate, and reminiscent of the Western image of ‘Ouroboros’, the image of a serpent biting its own tail to form a circle (oura, meaning “tail,” and boros, meaning “devourer.”). Ouroboros originated with ancient Egyptians iconography, about1600 years BC, entered the Western tradition via the Greeks and was adopted as a symbol of alchemy in Gnosticism and Hermeticism.

The potential for perfection of Iqbal’s rings seem counterpoised against the plight of his children with enlarged eyes. In his 2010 painting ‘The Holy Circle – 1’ his audience is presented with a five foot by 9 foot (approx.) oil on canvas. Effectively, the canvas is painted into two sections. The sections are not equal. To the left is what appears to be a square, leaving a rectangle on the other. The ‘square’ is lighter in colour than the rectangle that contains a single, quite well defined, (anonymised)  face. The square hosts a painterly sketch of a group of (anonymised) children in various stages of dress or undress. One child has red on its leg. A circle of white and red is off centre from the group and the square. The rectangle and the square are linked by a partially transparent black amorphous shape containing a thin wave of red, which appears to link the left hand group to the bald child’s portrait on the right.

In his ‘e-portfolio’ (.pdf) Mohammad Iqbal ‘talks’ about the birth of Bangladesh from out of the ashes of East Pakistan (formerly East Bengal).

“I was four years old in 1971 during the Bangladesh war of independence. The fear and suffering of the war have come back to my mind seeing the consecutive war and conflict in recent time. The dead bodies of the innocent children and the faces of the survivors - handicapped or orphans make regular headlines in the mass media. This recollects my childhood memories of the frightening 1971 war. Losing their parents and family, many orphan or street children are growing up in today’s world.”
Tranquillity in the Time of Uncertainty: My dispute, My Painting
Mohammad Iqbal 2020.

In light of the above, it is impossible not to correlate the images in ‘The Holy Circle – 1’ with the artist’s memories, recollections and internalised imagery with the very painful birthing of his country. The circle has red over a large part. The children are saved from conflict, but at what cost. The children grow with that blood tie to their past, which is forever echoed in the blood red disc of the Bangladesh flag set against the green of lush vegetation and fondly called ”the Red and Green”. The original flag of Bangladesh was created in the very place in which Mohammad Iqbal studied, and now teaches.

In a 2020 on-line art exhibition, Iqbal presented the latest in his ‘The Holy Circle’ series, number nine. It is a facial ‘portrait’ of a youth. The youths lips are pursed and lipstick red. The eyes in the portrait are characteristically larger than life, and blue. There is a barely disguised longing in those eyes, a brief sign of hope too. The eyes catch the viewer as half the subject’s face is illuminated by a cool white light that echoes a brightening sky in the background with its clouds set against a blue sky, but marred, as is the majority of the canvas, with a dark brick red. The rest of the face melds towards blue and out back into that red. There are indications of abrasions on the subject’s face, tying this work into the artist’s meme on abuse, war and the injurious lives of many children, seen in many of Mohammad Iqbal’s paintings.

In Iqbal’s ‘Holy Circle – 9’ the ring of blue/white, although appearing to be full, complete and perfect is actually blemished by a semi-circle of red, as witnessed in his ‘Holy Circle – 1’. That ‘blemish’ of blood, pain and anguish is reminiscent of the pain of birth. The ‘ensō’ circle is incomplete, but far from being negative instead brings a glimmer of hope (the brightening of the face in ‘Holy Circle – 9’ by the white light) as does birth. Like the ‘ensō’ circle, Iqbal’s ‘Holy Circle’ is hope in its imperfection, giving a chance for movement or development.

In Mohammad Iqbal’s atelier dark, mystical framed images of Baul life gaze at you. Children with doleful eyes regard you. Elders with Merlin-like beards beguile you. Behind a wooden easel, a large painting containing one large man-sized face and four smaller faces, all in shades of grey and black, their eyes caught by sudden light, shine for you. There is a hint of recognition, something deep, perplexing, profound and then it is gone.

A catalogue of a former exhibition ‘ Silent Revelations’ sits on a table next to another simply called ‘Mohammad Iqbal’. Behind the table is a painting with its back to you. On that backing board sits the legend - ‘Memories – 4, Medium: Acrylic on Japanese paper & Canvas, Size 91 x 91 cm, Year 2017. There is an irony as you feel an intimacy with the artist who delights in revealing his paintings and a little of himself, to you, and yet the ‘Memories’ painting shies its face away.

You leave, walking down that staircase a little heavier in your mind. You are beset by Iqbal’s imagery, his mastery over his mediums and with notions of expressive eyes and meaningful circles. Out, back on that Dhaka street, and just as the artist closes the door there is something of yourself left, upstairs in his atelier, just as there is something of the artist which follows you as you hail a rickshaw.