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The Gift to Experience

Shubhalakshmi Shukla visits the works of Hamid Bin Amar, a Hyderabad based artist who recently had a solo show at the Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai. Bin Amar’s paintings takes inspiration from the poetry of Wali Deccani and the modernist art tradition, observes the author.

Hamid Bin Amar is showing for the first time in Mumbai. I have had the opportunity to closely observe his works and the process in 1997-98 in Hyderabad. Since then it has been a decade and one could imagine major developments, as visual arts in the present times have become so expanded. On the contrary the developments can be termed as modest and pertaining to painting, as compared to the span of the journey. 

In the present suite of paintings one can find significant transformations along with a continuation of the earlier idiom which is rooted in the high modernist trends. Thus, on the one hand there is meaning oriented readable Arabic text quoted from well known poet like Wali Deccani, on the other a balanced and yet a chaotic imagery formed out of suspended objects and alphabets in pictorial space.

Doodled symbols like trees and birds, cars and aero planes, portraits characterizing melancholic aspects of urban living, monstrous sexuality and Minotaur all create an arbitrary surface of chaotic happenings, creating a familiar urban surrounding. There are however no specified pockets suggesting the surrounding location or background spaces for each of these drawings. Each individual drawing is made with identifiable emphasis on the spontaneity of line, form and colour. Elements of paintings, as these play a matured role to form the identity of the idiom that describes a high modernist trend.

The frontality of nude-standing female figures, with distorted faces appears in more than one painting recalls the monstrous sexuality addressed in the works of F.N. Souza. Whereas the unusual balance between play of scales in execution of objects recall the Indian miniatures. While both the elements form a significant quality in Hamid’s passionate approach to painting they do not deconstruct or question these tropes. Such an approach towards modernist language/s creates a romanticism which may be questionable in the present times.

Hamid’s imagery also calls an attention for an inherent paradox of the meaning oriented purist delicacy or the graffiti (Arabic text) placed as parallel to the spontaneous pathways of line that may suggest the unruly spaces of urban living.

Recalling his earlier imagery one may find the tea cups and cigarettes missing. However, his romantic approach to life and inherent knowledge in Urdu poetry has defeated the hesitation and courageously found a space in his imagery. The new dimensions to Hamid’s image making process also reminds of an early modernist painter-Chugutai. Chugutai’s meticulous line drawings of Saki or illustrations of Omarkhayyam’s Rubaiyaat are important asAbanindranath’s‘Bharatmata’ or ‘Arabian Nights’ to construct a modernist identity.

Thus, taking into account of the poetry he quotes from Wali Deccani his imagery simultaneously subdues and highlights all that is chaos and arbitrary as seen through the lens of following words  “ Duniya ne tajrubaat wa hawaadas ki shakl mein, Jo kuch mujhe diya hai wo lauta raha hoon main”  which means- The gift of experience and accident the world bestowed upon me , I return the same.                                         (Translation: K.V. Nagesh).