ART FACTS: Facts and fantasies

A surreal world where the natural world holds a new and different meaning is revealed in a group exhibition at Chawkandi Art gallery, Karachi. The paintings have uniqueness of themes and different style of execution. The structures in the paintings may appear simple, but the work nevertheless possesses an attraction.
Every painting shows versatility of handling subject, paints and composition. The creativity with paints can be witnessed like a rainbow where colours spread in a harmonious way. The brilliant use of colours from brown, blues, green, red and ochre gives the paintings a unique and fresh look.
The glimpses of animals and plants and the human forms can be seen in all of the artworks of three young Lahore based artists - . Kiran Saeed, Hadia Moiz and Sobia Ahmed.
Each artist has used numerous symbols in her work specially women for beauty and elephant for power, birds for peace, and men as the saviour. They discover their thoughts in paintings and that's why the world they paint is between fact and fantasy.
Paintings show characters in bold and bright colours, the animals and human figures appear together in the works symbolising human bond with the nature.
The artworks are descriptive making a painting more than just an image. They create vivid texture, which discuses human psychology and emotions in detail.
Kiran Saeed explores love and the happiness that results in being loved and loving others. She tried to explain the false interpretation of love. In her view chasing love and chasing never ending happiness is an illusion because love is something inside us, which sweetens our bitter self and made us a normal person. And its absence made us ugly just like a body of flesh that will fade away in a certain time period.
She made paintings in a series just like a story to reveal her thoughts and express her in a different style creating her own vocabulary and strengthening her expression in a chain of paintings. She uses light colour tones mainly shades of beige and pink in her works.
Haida Moiz considers her paintings as the product of her thoughts. Expressing herself in the paintings is just like interpreting her views in colours. She wants to share the experiences she gains from her surroundings. The environments she lives in enable her to feel about things differently and made her own conclusions with distinct perspective which she then transforms on her canvases. She uses the medium of painting to vent out her sentiments about the world around. She feels free to express everything in her paintings which she wants to share with other people. She prefers to work in miniature in her recent work she uses opaque water colours, tea wash, paint wash and silver paper to portray her expressions good or bad as it may be.
Sobia Ahmed deals with the present in the context of the past. She wants to highlight the gap between the common man and the emperor which has created segregation in the past and still exists in fact the gap has been widened and the position of the two remains the same over the centuries.
She feels annoyed by the system that creates such differences between the ruler and the masses. She sees the brutality, cruelty done to common man by the glory and glitter of the rulers as the same today as ever before even after many centuries has passed but the ground reality remains the same. The dates have changed during the years not the position.
She feels betrayed by the rulers who enjoy the glory and let the common people deals with the same old situations and problems which will never be solved. Therefore she portray an emperor and a common man in her series of paintings explaining the gap and unequal status of the two which started hundreds of years ago and still going on and nobody knows when will it stop. Everybody knows what type of damages this divided has done to our system but there is no solution yet but there is hope which made us survive in this disparate society it is time to change this mindset for good.
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