Good news for the art lovers who wants to be privileged by viewing some of the finest pieces by master Jamil Naqsh an exhibition entitled 'A Retrospective' at Albemarle Gallery, London is inaugurated at 1st July and will continue till 23rd July, 2011. The collection comprised of works painted within the past five years by Jamil Naqsh and it is his first solo show in London.
It is not a full retrospective, but it takes up some of the major themes of his career. While viewing the paintings in the catalogue e-mail to me by Najmi Sura I find astonishing play of light adding to the ethereal and airy quality of the paintings. The figure drawing is impeccable. No one other than Jamil Naqsh can handle light so beautifully. He has an extra ordinary command in handling light and shade, with variations of colour from light to dark.
His recent exhibition shows the distance Jamil Naqsh has travelled since late 1950s. At such a mature age mostly artist's work stop at certain point but every new exhibition of Jamil Naqsh brings something novel and refreshing, his work is still evolving with the passage of time.
Both the themes of nude and pigeon, nude and horse are part of the exhibition. Each painting has a different overall colour tone, much subdued, darkened here and there and textured with small brush strokes none of his painting is lacking in any of the cunning in figure drawing and colour application.
During the last five decades that he has been painting, Jamil Naqsh has created an immense body of work, with single - minded devotion and the lifestyle of a recluse. He uses very diverse sources for his paintings. One can see the impact of Mughal work, and of European masters. For example, there are a number of paintings inspired by the work of the Italian sculptor Marino Marini and another source of inspiration, inevitably, was by the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso; and yet another was the work of the great French neo-classicist, Jean-Dominique Ingres.
This exhibition includes white angelic birds in all their natural grace and beauty, fluffy, cuddly bundles of feathers whose warmth and softness is almost tactile. In Pakistan he is probably most loved for his images of pigeons, or of women and pigeons combined. These birds have a deep personal meaning for him. As a child, he saw them flying in and out of the courtyard of the family house. In personal terms, they offer a nostalgic glance backwards - a glimpse of the familiar, the domestic, the soothing - of the pleasures of traditional family life, snatched away from him by the trauma of his mother's early death, followed by the violence of Partition. The titles of his paintings "God Save the Pigeons", "Love the Pigeon" and "Picasso Pigeons" shows his attachment to pigeons.
The famous pigeon made its appearance in early 1960s, with his familiar gesture of an upraised hand holding a pigeon close to the face. Naqsh's main subject is love. Each of his painting is the representation of a particular emotional moment. This is also true of those paintings by Naqsh where images of women and pigeons are combined. The pigeons are, in this case, the secret messengers of love.
Jamil Naqsh found his métier in female nudes, with mastery come confidence and the temptation to take liberties. Many of his paintings depict female figures in many bewildering Tantric erotic poses. Now there is no distortion or stylisation but tenderly and faithfully rendered female anatomy emphasising placed all its corporeality and bodily charm by appropriately lights and shadows.
The reclining nude paintings are almost in the same pose but have been deliberately made in a set pattern of square and rectangular boxes like confining the nude to certain boundaries. For tender sensibilities he uses dark some what blackish tones for his nudes in some of the paintings.
The female figures are not stiffly diagrammatic but alive. Their corporeality is emphasis by their slightly plump figures. There is greater command of the female anatomy and by just a little exaggeration; the curvaceous lying figure is made doubly alluring. There is classical clarity and restraint in his recent work. The rendering of the figure's rise and fall, dip and swell is such that it makes it quiveringly alive. The colouring is only slightly varied and shaded and get the figure has weight and volume. The subdued play of light is shown by using white in lighted and brown in the shadowed area with just a few highlights.
The flesh tint of the skin has the freshness and transparency of a healthy and youthful body but Jamil Naqsh sedulously avoids making the surface enamel smooth, which would make it inert and lifeless like furniture. Rather, he breaks the smoothness with very small slanting brush strokes of many related colours and that creates an attractive textural effect. This is much more natural and appealing. Some of the paintings are prominent with bright colours such as flaming red background and also very bright blue and yellow.
He has an uncanny command of the female human anatomy and the rare ability to make it palpable and substantial with flesh and blood, also the power to capture the bloom of the skin with all the variations of light and colour. There is irresistible charm and allure in his nudes but they are never erotic or provoking.
An elegant catalogue is also issued at the occasion which consist Edward Lucie-Smith's (an Art Historian, Critic and Writer) erudite and eloquent essay, which gives an insight into the fascinating and cultured nature and character of Jamil Naqsh and his work.
He writes, "Naqsh's paintings of female nudes have an extraordinary, quasi-sculptural plasticity, so much so that they almost seem to invite one to touch them. One of the things that one learns from this series of nudes is that Naqsh's attitude to his artistic sources is non-hierarchical. He sees the works of art that interest him as things-in-themselves, outside the framework of conventional art history. This makes him an important forerunner: he arrived at the philosophical and aesthetic position we now describe as 'Post Modern' long before most of his colleagues and rivals in the West."
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