M arcel Duchamp, the most discussed artist of the Twentieth Century, says his biographer Calvin Tomkins, believed that “the artist performed only a part of the creative process and that it was up to the viewer to complete the process by interpreting the work and assessing its permanent value. The viewer, in other words, was as important as the artist..
.” Perhaps, the reviewer, too, has a similar role. A writer attempts, with a background of art history and aesthetic theories, to look at a work of art through multiple lenses: formal, contextual and cultural.
The posthumous solo exhibition of Shahid Jalal is an opportunity to approach the artist’s favourite, hence recurring subject, landscape, from various angles – and from varying lengths. Faced with a stretch of fields, landscapes that Jalal rendered throughout his creative life, lend a range of choices: flowers, trees, bushes, water channels, sections of residential or religious buildings, animals, the sunshine, clear or cloudy sky and the time of day in a particular season. The person (the painter) can decide where to position themselves.
One may decide to stay – safely – at the edge, standing on a narrow pathway to enjoy a distant scene in its entirety. Many painters in Pakistan, especially in the Punjab favour this option, since a majority of them follow the formal structure of Khalid Iqbal’s landscapes. Iqbal is the unmatched master of the genre.
Looking at his paintings one hardly feels the need to enter t.