PAINT CANVAS CURTAINS WINDOWS

It conceals something and shows something else, either a floral pattern, a uniform colour (like one of Ayaz Jokhio’s painting of white drapes). A curtain – also called a blind – obscures what is outside our living spaces (not unlike our eyelids). These entities offer a substitute to reality, physical as well as metaphoric. Once installed, both the curtains and the canvases are flat surfaces, and in Jokhio’s words “hide what’s behind them”.

This brings us back to the inter-textuality of The Thousand and One Nights – and to Ayaz Jokhio’s recent work in which curtains of varying images are no different from the fabric (canvas) on which these are painted. Perhaps the painting in the composition is the one we encounter in Madrid’s Prado Museum. The French philosopher argues about the identity of the painting within the painting. Michel Foucault, in the first chapter of The Order of Things, examines Diego Velasquez’s Las Meninas a large painting in which the Spanish master depicted himself working on a big canvas with its back to the viewer. These are pieces of fabric painted as if hanging from a rod – waiting to be straightened so that their ‘print’/picture becomes clear and legible. For these paintings – currently part of the solo exhibition, Curtained, at Canvas Gallery, Karachi, (January4-13), the artist got a number of visuals printed on small fabrics, converted them into physical curtains and with their folds used those as reference to his imagery.

Ayaz Jokhio is one of a few original, innovative and intelligent artists in Pakistani art, who never cease to surprise and impress their viewers by erasing the demarcation between concept and picture, between content and form. The painting based on this picture denotes Jokhio’s passage in the labyrinth of real and virtual, amid fact and fiction (recalling Robert Browning’s line, “Is fiction which makes fact alive, fact too?”).Ĭonnected to this canvas, the word window is what makes the entire body of his new works relevant, exciting and intriguing. The Microsoft standard image, the view of a landscape, is so real that a majority of computer users have seen it, more than any popular, famous, and iconic landscape in the history of art and so unreal that it only exists on computer screens.

PAINT CANVAS CURTAINS WINDOWS

The blinds are printed and furled, but the artist has rendered them in such a way that a viewer is able to stretch the fabric in his/her imagination and get the complete picture: A Punjabi cinema billboard, a black and white film still featuring Madhubala and Dilip Kumar, fighter planes against a clear blue sky, a brick wall, Imran Khan addressing the nation, a clip showing a catwalk, spreads of blue, and of red flowers, and the original wallpaper of Windows XP. Jokhio has drawn curtains (in all senses of the word) against flat walls, on his canvases. Suddenly his paintings started to unravel. The discussion then drifted to the structure of this classic, how stories are interwoven as one emerges out of another ad infinitum.

Responding to a query about books, Jokhio shared his recent reading of The Thousand and One Nights in Abul-Hassan Mansur Ahmed’s brilliant Urdu translation. With new canvases of Ayaz Jokhio at his studio, I was trying to navigate his concept, till a simple, regular and much repeated question helped me find my way into his work.

Paint canvas curtains