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| 08/01/2001 |
| A COMPRESSION OF NATURE |
Review of Ijaz Ul Hassan's Art Exhibition, Lahore.
Published in LIBAS, March 2001.
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| Ijaz ul Hassan is an environmentalist's dream. At his best he is to painting what William Wordsworth was to poetry, expressing visions of nature recollected in tranquillity. |
| His recent solo exhibition at the Lahore Art Gallery (8-22 January 2001) - his first in over eight years of abstinence - reaffirmed the singular eminence that he enjoys among contemporary painters of Pakistan. Not only does his work demonstrate his consummate mastery over each medium, the range of his subjects reminds us of his radial awareness, his heightened sense of consciousness of his surroundings and of everything happening around him. |
| To his traditional acolytes, Ijaz ul Hassan offers evergreen images of the flowers and plants that continue to engage his eye. A flower becomes the garden, a tree the forest. And in a triptych redolent with sensuous undertones, he depicts an almost voluptuous vine girding a submissive tree. It is a joyous painting, an exuberant microcosm of the fertility of Nature itself. |
| Other works reflect an awareness of the seasons, the stamp akin to a signature that each season imprints on its imagery - flush green for the fullness of summer, waning gold for autumn, the white coldness of an American winter. There may be some who may interpret the inclusion of such autumnal or winter subjects as admissions of his own mortality. Had Ijaz ul Hassan been only a landscape artist, that suggestion might have had some force. But as Wordsworth was not simply a dreamy poet given to Romanticism but rose to separate heights of revolutionary zeal in response to the French Revolution, similarly Ijaz's work cry out with a sense of outrage. The most expressive of these, and one likely to become as enduring an icon as his earlier Vietnamese series have been, is the Saffron Madonna, her arms outstretched arms in helpless grief at the carnage splayed at her feet. It is not an indictment of the politics of violence; it is an indictment of Man's inhumanity to the sanctity of Motherhood. |
| Admirers of the artistry of Mian Ijaz ul Hassan envy those who have seduced him away from painting and have channeled his unflagging energies into the muddier mainstream of national politics. But they are prepared to wait for his return, for they know that their reward will be an exuberant display of unmatched talent. He remains Cyclopean in his vision, or in Wordsworth's inimitable words, |
| `Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep |
| Thy heritage, thou eye among the blind.' |
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| 08 January 2001 |
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