‘What Next!’ The work of six NCA students

LAHORE: Art lovers and interested viewers were attracted to Ejaz Art Gallery on Saturday to view the paintings of students from National College of Arts (NCA). This was the first exhibition by the young artists who were excited to have their work displayed and at being surrounded by media and other viewers.
Aqueel Abbas-whose paintings were perhaps the most expressive- had painted an aerial view of children who were apparently smiling but hidden deep inside their simple, children’s smile was a fear, the impression of which was achieved by the use of grotesque colours and the play of light against dark.
“This denotes living in a country run by the army ,” says Abbas, “these faces are not only scary, they are a picture of what it is like growing up in such a country.” This is perhaps best expressed in a painting in which a father is beating up a child in his lap. Violence, force, and repression are seen in Abbas’s paintings. Also each of the children continues to look hauntingly at the viewer, straight in the eye, which is extremely unnerving.
Another set of impressive paintings came from the brush of Anam Khaliq who had drawn a series of lips in various positions. In one of the paintings the lips were stitched together while in another one, the lips had broken free from them, with only a part left stitched.
“My work revolves around fakeness and double standards,” Anam says, “I intend to show how smiles and expressions, seemingly real, can actually be the total opposite.” Dua Abbas Rizvi’s paintings also presented an intriguing show of dimensions. With a Lynchian effect, her paintings seemed to be surreal and bordering on the real at the same time. Her subjects are wide eyed and were watching things as if they were in a dream. Theatrics are what she is interested in portraying but at the same time keeping in mind ‘a jarring fusion of multiple times and spaces, rather than the safety of the familiar’.
Rafia Butt’s depicting of isolation was also unique. She says that she has tried to depict spaces and reality according to the way she perceives them, thus proving that reality is subjective. Though her dimensions of time seem to be intact, her dimensions of space are not. There are divisions that she has herself added in order to confuse the real demarcations of the outlines.
At the same time, light plays a very important role in all of her paintings. The most powerful one is the solid light coming through the curtain in the doorway of a house. The rest of the house is dark, black, but this is the only light that can be seen.
Other interesting works include those made by Usman Alvi. Because Alvi cannot hear or speak, he says that for him the physical connection between objects matter a lot and that picturesque scenario is very important. His series of paintings that show a boy and several cocks and hens flying around magically seem to express the sound of the birds squawking and flapping their wings, of the wooden friction between rungs of ladders entwined within each other, and the scratching of hens as they peck at food in the boy’s hands.
This in itself is a very strong painting, while others were done with intricate detail in realism. Madiha Sikandar’s work was also displayed. She used book covers to show that inside and outside do not always match.