Black - The works of Bipasha Hayat

Shadow of Memories

 

Black is not exhibited in so elementary a state as white. We meet with it in the vegetable kingdom in semi-combustion: and charcoal, a substance especially worthy of attention on other accounts, exhibits a black colour. Again if woods - for example, boards, owing to the action of light, air, moisture, are deprived in part of their combustibility, there appears first the grey then the black colour. So again, we can convert even portions of animal substance to charcoal by semi-combustion.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, 1810.

 

 

In Bangladesh’s cooler month of February (2019), I had the great pleasure of meeting the former actress and playwright turned artist, Bipasha Hayat, at her home studio in Dhaka 1212. She is the daughter of actor and film director Abul Hayat, and is married to actor and film director Tauquir Ahmed.

 

Bipasha Hayat has made an international name for herself as a Bangladesh ‘Conceptual’ artist and has turned her attention to one of the most important areas of human existence – memory. Issues of our humanity, identity, self, ‘I’ and ‘Other’, culture etcetera are reliant upon being remembered. In a series of intriguing works Bipasha Hayat has woven a tangible treatise on memory through the colour black.

 

“Memory of past episodes provides a sense of personal identity-the sense that I am the same person as someone in the past. … the sense of identity derives from two components, one delivering the content of the memory and the other generating the sense of mineness…. In addition, articulating the components of the sense of identity promises to bear on the extent to which this sense of identity provides evidence of personal identity.”

Memory and the Sense of personal Identity Stanley B. Klein and Shaun Nichols, Mind, Vol. 121, No. 483 (July 2012)

 

In her series of images comprising the installation ‘Cast My Vote For Socrates' Acquittal’ (2020) Hayat references the Greek philosopher Socrates’ sentence of death in 399 BC (B.C.E.). According to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (in The Apology), Socrates’ crimes were ‘failing to acknowledge gods worshiped by the city’ and ‘corrupting the young’. In her hand-pressed impressions, printed from chiselled stone and black acrylic paint on 221 pieces of watercolour paper, Hayat brings back to our cultural memory the injustice served on one of the greatest Western philosophers of all times. The number 221 references those who voted for Socrates’ acquittal (220), plus her own vote, against the 280 votes for his demise via the drinking of hemlock. The artwork is her vote against injustice, historical and current. Remembering that initial trial, some two thousand and four hundred years later (2012), a new international panel gathered to re-run Socrates’ trial, in Athens and, ironically, acquitted him of his crimes.

 

In other works, such as her ‘Memoir’ series (2016), Hayat uses corrugated cardboard painted black and rendered to intimate words, spaces, sentences, even paragraphs. With raised sections initially ‘reading’ as anonymised and coded segments of ‘text’, the viewer observes what once, from a distance, appears as text recodes itself before their eyes into the corrugated board painted black, which it is. The viewer misreads, mis-recalls and mis-projects images from memory, onto the presented artwork. As the visitor’s brain conjures, clinging to the initial notion of text, desperately trying to make meaning where there is none, their thoughts bid for logic, rationality, and auto-realign to thoughts of Braille (the system of raised dots read with fingers by people having low vision, or who are sight less). As the viewer closes on the artwork fresh recollections occur. Perhaps this enigmatic work, though not text in the common visual sense, can be ‘read’ through touch, though touch is not permitted within the viewing space.

 

The work confounds and puzzles. Memories dragged up are catapulted at the artworks, hoping that one might stick; that the recalled memory might decode the not encoded. It doesn’t of course. The text, which is not text, only hints at some, seemingly unassailable, language.

 

As intimated by Goethe, charcoal (that which is especially worthy of attention, see above) makes a mark of black colour. Black may be both absence and presence. Black, as text, offers to reveal but as asemic text rescinds that offer in favour of mystery and conundrum. Black can both obscure (as in Hayat’s Memoirs) and reveal. The beauty of faces, of human and animal bodies, of delicate plants, of thought and intention are revealed in the work of artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Or, there again, with Chinese black ink made from a mixture of soot and animal glue, such as in the works by Qi Baishi and his ‘ink wash shrimps’ (1951) or the ‘Famine Sketches’ (1943-1944) of Bangladesh’s Zainul Abedin Mymensingh. While charcoal black, and black ink, may communicate through images and ‘writing’ from the conscious mind, with the intended expedition of acts of communication, there are other ‘texts’ which spring from the subconscious, and which communicate in a less than linear fashion, like the ‘Memoir’ series (above).

 

The making of marks has been intrinsic to humanity from the first cave dwellers, and their awaiting walls, to the black on white text of the hand phone screen. Since early 800 AD with the advent of Chinese printing and later with the world’s first moveable type in China (11th century) we have entrusted our memories to devices and objects exterior to ourselves. We draw, we report, we send and we display but we also save, hold data in our memories, on our computer hard drives and external hard drives. We back up, save to hard copy, preserve memories in books, essays, files, in boxes, on shelves and in rooms because our memory recall cannot be relied upon unless we have eidetic (photographic) memory, which few have. And that was the prompting behind the first Chinese printing, to promp the oral story tellers. Bipasha Hayat reveals our dependency upon access to memory in her works concerning the use of black and it's innate ability to both reveal and obscure.

 

While it is generally considered that white reveals and black conceals, when we consider the ‘tabula rasa’, the blank page (probably white) we are considering a background to script, or text or image. If we were to write or type white words onto the white page, we would see little. If, on the other hand, we write or type black words onto that same white page, our thoughts will become revealed.

 

French Poet and writer Andre Breton was intrigued by the writings of Sigmund Freud and his enquiries into the subconscious mind. Since 1913, Breton engaged in the process of automatic writing and later, with the Dadaists especially with Philippe Soupault, furthered his interest in the notions of automatic (subconscious) writing, or surrealist automatism (occurring in the book Les Champs magnétiques The Magnetic Fields, 1920). Breton mentions that…..

 

“Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.”

 

Later Breton originated the first Surrealist Manifesto (Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, 1924) which outlined his ideas about art and literature concerning the subconscious and the symbolism of dreams. While Breton and others wished to bypass the logical, conscious mind and access the subconscious and its non-filtered thoughts and ideas, they were unaware of one tribal people in India who had no access to literature, but nevertheless produced something the Surrealists would have been amazed by.

The Hill Korwa, living in the Lalarpat and Baladarpat villages in Raigarh District, Madhya Pradesh, India, have no linguistic, written, script. They do, however, produce what has been termed a ‘Magic Script’, that is to say a text-like calligraphy which is not born from language but is ‘painted’ as ‘magical messages’ (J. Swaminathan) by these illiterate tribes people.

 

This Korwa ‘Magic Script’ resembles the concept of asemic writing, generally seen as writing which is a wordless, open, semantic form of writing, and having no specific semantic content. Asemic writing (or script) creates tension. It ‘talks’ about the confusion between the thing seen and the thing it is pointing to, as per Belgium Surreal artist René Magritte and his ‘The Treachery of Images’ (1929) proclaiming that a painting of a pipe is not a pipe (Ceci n'est pas une pipe). This is the area of interest for the practitioners of asemics, in assisting the ‘reader’ to focus on the actual work, its marks and its swirls and to study them for what they are, not for the ‘words’ and their meaning being represented.

 

Asemic calligraphy arranged across draped black muslin in Hayat’s ‘Shadow of Memories’ are reminiscent of Dada and the Surrealist notion of ’Psychic Automatism’. Images rendered onto the draped muslin resemble text, just as the cardboard indentations did in Hayat’s ‘Memoir’ series. Once again the viewer is challenged by the appearance of text that is not text, but the appearance of text. Again the mind wishes to decipher and asks ‘is this the text of another language?’

 

In Byzantine and Renaissance paintings in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, there occurred design motifs in certain religious paintings which mimicked, but were not, ‘Eastern’ script. This faux script is known as ‘Pseudo-Kufic’ or Kufesque script. It frequently resembles arabesque styles of lettering, and is painted as embroidered decoration on the hems of garments or edges of carpets in wonderfully detailed paintings. The word ‘Kufic’ explains an early angular form of the Arabic alphabet, found chiefly in decorative inscriptions. The above mentioned scripts had the appearance of, but was not, Arabic. They were representations without textual meaning, and were used for decorative purposes and frequently presenting an "oriental" atmosphere to paintings with regard to individuals or, in particular, Holyland scenes.

 

Hayat’s ‘Shadow of Memories’ ‘script’ is hand rendered. To all intents and purposes is ‘in the wind’. The installation’s black muslin has the possibility of a fluidity of movement of, essentially, throwing its ‘text’ to the wind, making it tentative, possible, but uncertain just as the script itself appears laden with possibilities, but remains an enigma and undecipherable. Those works of Bipasha Hayat are the antithesis of the idea of Tibetan prayer flags, which traditionally are hung in high places to catch the wind so that the Buddhist prayer is carried to bless all sentient beings. Hayat’s works proffer but rescind.

 

In Hayat’s ‘Shadow of Memories’ there is also the sensation that we might be looking at the darkness of memory loss, through degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, where working memory and long term memory are affected early and where sufferers encounter difficulties in the retelling and reading of texts. In a sense, we the observer of Hayat’s black asemic scripts are forced into the role of the recipient of a degenerative brain disorder. There is much (deliberately) ‘lost in translation’. Much we cannot quite grasp. We become thrown onto the images that are not words, like films in languages which we do not understand, sans subtitles to guide our otherwise active mind (s) through the complex plot twists. There again, we are faced with something resembling the fascinating non-textual, but illustrative, ‘magic scripts’ of the Korwa. Yet Hayat’s work does not use her asemic imagery as an exotic decoration like the pseudo-kulfic script, but more like an offering akin to the Korwa’s ‘magic scripts, and with her works we, her audience, are forced to accept that there may be meanings other than those we can effectively grasp as she intrigues and teases her audience with hints.

 

 

The Blue Lotus Magazine Special Issue 3

 https://issuu.com/martinabradley/docs/the_20blue_20lotus_20magazine_20special_203

17th Asian, African & Mediterranean International Modern Arts Exhibition preface

 

I sit here (in Cambodia), awash with sounds of the gamelan, as the Director of the 17^th Asian, African & Mediterranean International Modern Arts Exhibition, Luo Qi (China’s foremost exponent of Calligraphysm and Characterism), sits in Portugal and many of the artists featured in this new online exhibition sit in their respective countries, or are displaced and awaiting passage home. My sky is blue. Sunlight streams gently through my apartment’s open door. There is a slight breeze rustling the bamboo. White butterflies dance of joy.

 

In other times, this truly cosmopolitan exhibition would have had a splendid physical presence.

 

For sixteen years, and from divers countries, artists have gathered in places including Luo Qi’s Chinese hometown of Hangzhou, China. While these exhibitions have always been international, the move to digital has allowed many more artists to participate. This time there are participants from Australia; Bangladesh; Brazil; Bulgaria; Canada; China; France; India; Indonesia; Iran; Italy; Japan; Korea; Madagascar; Malaysia; Mauritius; Mexico; Morocco; Nepal; Philippines; Portugal; Serbia; Seychelles; Singapore; Slovenia; Thailand; Togo; Sri Lanka, United States of America, and Vietnam. The artworks of those chosen artists are open to the world, and not just to be seen by cultured art aficionados, but rather any, and all, intrigued and fascinated faces.

 

In the past artists had to physically create their exhibitions. Stepladders erected, drills, Rawlplugs and all the other paraphernalia of exhibition making would have been at hand, and busy in hands erecting not just their own but each others creations. Camaraderie, sheer joie de vivre and all the wonders of team spirit had been naturally sparked during the coming together of the exhibitors, the exhibitions, and their audiences echoing the overall meme of international cooperation, engendered by Director Luo Qi.

 

This year (2020) is slightly different.

 

In many senses Luo Qi is a modern day Chinese Admiral Zheng He. Like the famous, (or is that infamous) adventures of Homer’s Odysseus or the seven voyages of Zheng He (ambassador and explorer), Lou Qi has navigated his way to countries near and far. In now seventeen ‘voyages’ Luo Qi has collected not giraffes and jewels, but merchandise far more precious – world artists and their art. Instead of physically sailing the seven seas, this year Lou Qi has ‘surfed’ the World Wide Web. Ever expanding his horizons, Lou Qi has set his sights on a global Internet collaboration of artists and brought together over one hundred artists, of whom seventy plus have been chosen to celebrate the 17^th (annual) Asian, African & Mediterranean International Modern Arts collaboration, in an online exhibition.

 

Luo Qi asked me to commit to the momentous task of commenting on some of the works on show for the exhibition. Of course I was not able to write about all, so you have my apologies for that. I was full of mixed feelings and mixed loyalties, for I have known some of the participants and have enjoyed their artworks over many years. I struggled with impartiality and ultimately wrote down the names of those artists whose work connected with me most, as I scrolled through. I hasten to add that the situation I found myself in was to choose a ‘first among equals’, an impossible task; however I will mention those artists I did choose and the works that I was particularly struck by; in country alphabetical order.

 

China

 Shi Jianguo creates using coloured inks on paper. He depicts (largely) emancipated female qipao (cheongsam) wearing graphic ‘characters’. They have the distinct appearance of stepping out from circa 1930’s Shanghai, with all the cultural visual ambiguity that might entail. The rouged lips of these socialite or upper class women are often pursed, sometimes wantonly smiling and frequently obscured by elongated fingers holding cigarettes. Shi Jianguo’s works are splendid caricatures that, in another age, might have been seen in Chinese magazines such as Modern Sketch or considered as a pastiche of images in the magazine (Liángyǒu) The Young Companion which reflected Shanghai’s growing colonialist cultural identity. 

 

Zhang Fangbai, one of China’s modernist calligraphers, usually specialises in the depiction of birds of prey however, in these three innovative paintings he presents a literal ‘bird’s eye’ view of the ancient traditional of Chinese landscape. In these images Zhang Fangbai re-perceives notions of the art of Chinese ink brush painting by using the synthesis of a more modern Western approach of painting with oil on canvas and ideas inherited from ink brush tradition. The three canvases presented are a reverential salute to the past while simultaneously being an acknowledgement of China’s modernity and unification with Western and Eastern ideas.

 

India

 Maitreyi Nandi’s exquisite artworks, which to some in the West may appear to illustrative, follow a distinct modernist path set down by India’s premiere modern artists such as Jamini Roy and Gaganendranath Tagore, who referenced local Indian visual folk traditions to present their own brands of Indian ‘Modernism’. Maitreyi Nandi paints (often) seductive, positive, images of the plight of women. Some enlightened women are depicted within the Hindi mythos as goddesses, or mothers in frequently glowing representations of Indian fables. Maitreyi Nandi follows in the footsteps of pioneering female Indian artist such as Amrita Sher-Gil, Pratima Devi and many others.

 

Italy

 Marcello Schiavo’s delicate yet intriguing watercolour landscapes are somewhat reminiscent of the Impressionists’ works in the way they are able to both capture light and our imagination. His ethereal touch graces his substrate and our vision. There is a hint of a prayer to nature, or a meditation on nature in his light and airy works. His images enable his subjects to breathe, while his viewing audience must catch their collective breaths at his stunning portrayals. Marcello Schiavo’s works might be compared to those of England’s Joseph Mallord William Turner for, like Turner, Schiavo was a skilled draughtsman and an adept watercolourist.

 

Korea

 Shin Young Ho is a surrealist inspired artist. He is also a most unusual modern Korean calligrapher, who specialises in rendering huge brush strokes, on paper. His chief meme is nature, specifically the minutiae of insects like ants and mosquitoes, painted large, as if seen under a microscope, some with black ink, or black ink and a colour wash. His well-defined ants seem very Dalian. Salvador Dali created images of ants in his paintings to represent desire and the decay he encountered as a boy in Catalonia. Shin Young Ho’s ants, though mostly black, sometimes occur as red against a grey wash, but are always stunning in their size and clarity.  

 

Madagascar

 Pierrot Men, is a photographing artist specialising in classical black and white photographic images. In his sensitive, yet outstanding, images of simple, humble people Madagascar people he rivals photographers such as Robert Frank and Daidō Moriyama, giants of photography. Images of the lives of ordinary Madagascans come alive through his lens in rich black and white, revealing not just the working lives of the people but the photographer’s intense love for them. Elsewhere his work has been likened to photographic poetry, delicate yet intense, for he has the keenest of eyes coupled with the quickness of thought to capture otherwise ephemeral moments.

 

Sri Lanka

 Asela Abeywardene, is a ceramicist extraordinaire. Gaining inspiration from nature and the stillness of her religion, the artist has developed an organic approach to pottery that reflects the beauty as well as the tenuous nature of existence. As you might expect, coming from an island imbued with a long history of Buddhist, there is a Buddhist nature to her works as well as intimations of the sea. Delicate forms dripped or stroked with green, and as tentative as the leaves they echo, remind us of our fragile existence. There are hints of the best of Art Nouveau and Art Deco in her works, melding artistic creations East to West to produce her uniqueness.

 

Vietnam

 Tao Huong delights in painting nature as well as engagingly colourful portraits (seen elsewhere). Seen here are three engaging landscapes full of energy and movement, yet each capturing a different moment and a different hue, reminiscent of the work done by Claude Monet with haystacks and the different aspects of light on Rouen Cathedral. Tao Huong’s works give depth for the viewer to sink into. In each of the paintings the hues are carefully balanced for harmony, yet of the three it is the brown landscape that has me transfixed by its intriguing perspective, and balance of warm and cooler colours.

 

 

Two images - Yeoh Eng Hin

Today I was asked, by my Malaysian artist friend Yeou Eng Hin, to write a little something about two paintings.

In a sense both images are anonymous. No names attach themselves.

The first image appears with a heaviness of rock interspersed with flecks of green (foliage) together, taking up two thirds of the canvas space, they dwarf the figures strung along the bottom third of the canvas.

If the viewer gazes to the centre of that final third of the canvas, a figure in turquoise framed by the darkness of a cave, can be seen resting on a wooden fence. She gazes out to the viewer, separated from all that is behind her, separated from the other human figures sharing the space of that final third.

We, the intended audience, are captured by this woman’s gaze. It is as if her separation speaks to our separation from the canvas. We can only guess who she is and the reason for her gaze. We can, of course, layer our own interpretations onto that gaze, but we can never be sure of our correctness.

The second image, appearing framed, is more ethereal than the first. It is a wisp, a glimpse or memory half there, half residing inside the mind of both the painter and his audience. It is another cave painting, but lighter, non-threatening. There is no broodiness, but an airiness as if an Impressionists hand has reached out from another time to tell subtle stories of the East. This painting has the story telling ability, and elegance, of an illustration, perhaps discussing the group on the bottom right as we face the painting.

Where the astute observer might connect the former painting with a predominately Western way of painting, the latter painting, though connected still to the West, echoes with intimations of an Easternness found in Indian paintings of the early twentieth century. The overall effect engages the viewer more by what isn’t there, than what is. The painter and the audience must work together to complete the hint suggested there.

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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.