ART FACTS: Exquisite compositions

The enchanted and charming paintings by Hajra Mansur and involving abstract impressions of Mansur Rahi were a treat for art lovers of Karachi. The exhibition at Unicorn gallery of the artist couple was an exquisite play of forms and colours. Hajra's signature style of paintings with a rich touch of eastern and modern art elements based on Oriental tradition reflects love and harmony.
The way she paints highlights her themes transferring all her love to the canvas. Her work focuses on a stylized female form with jewels and flowing garments of her own fashion.
She portrays her personal favourite elements in the paintings. The leading figure is a female. In her paintings the portrait of a girl and birds are beautifully represented within the close space. The women are shown in their delicate feminism peacefully in love. Her mastery of water colours creates various hues melting into each other. There is a smooth liquid touch to her paintings where the colours dissolve into foggy backgrounds.
Her human figure is rendered poetically with features in sweeping curves and arcs, elongated and curling waves. Basically it is linear and was rhythmic, winding in smoothly flowing lines.
It is all purely fanciful, extremely decorative and highly stylized drawing of beautiful females with mermaid like bodies. The colours were exaggerated, full of strong contrasts of light and dark areas. Mansur Rahi's figurative paintings were also not realistic rather geometrical but with anatomical accuracy - with the help of swinging arcs, circles, squares and triangles he render approximately the particular natural shape and creates a forceful design.
His transparent cubist work has particular themes such as fear of nuclear war, world food crisis, quest for peace. There is a distinctly marked design quality with a feeling for form and space in his paintings. The sharp and clear contours appeal viewers.
His figures have a massive monumental quality. A thrust of design and particularly the rhythmic element is very important in his work, which is style of his own.
Rahi's paintings are restricted to certain colours which are never too bright. There are always dark shadows behind bright colours. The colours flow without hard boundaries on his canvas giving an impressionistic look. His world of composition with independent lines transformed human and horse figures creating a world with massive cubical volume.
He draws gigantic figures according to set formulae with meticulous care in which some idea or message had to be put across forcefully. There is a feeling of release, liberation and joy in some paintings against the serious, sombre and emotionally worked up style in others.
The dreamlike arcs and circles in light colours seem to turn and twist on his canvas; creating tones speaking of another world beyond, however has nothing to do with the subject, enclosed in forms and their balanced relation to each other. [email protected]