Celebrated artist Rafiqun Nabi with his ongoing solo exhibition has broken a recent trend. While most artists present sufferings of the struggling classes, the romantic artist defines and narrates merrymaking and joy.
That does not mean Nabi has created anything minus-reality but viewers can feel the essence of real-life amusement of people that they tend to overlook in their daily life. In fact, the seasoned artist took the challenge of enchanting the viewers with simple stories painted on huge canvases against the backdrop of the contemporary trend of the country’s artists depicting violence, injustice, oppression etc in various experimental ways.
In Touch with the Real, the 10th solo of Rafiqun Nabi at Dhaka Art Centre, features 27 recently created figurative paintings, 14 of which are done in acrylic and the rest in watercolour. Excepting four vertical watercolours, all the artworks on display are huge.
It is true that ‘size does not matter in chopping wood’. But, when the big canvases articulate a vibrant life, the feeling is excellent. In such cases, even the normal stories of life assume an epic quality.
Most of his paintings are reconstructed from his observations and memory of places and people. And the artist articulates the mental state, physical setting, and material environment of the subject with delicate lines and forms and different shades of vibrant colours like blue, violate, and green.
So, his style swings between observed realism and a removed generalised image, often with the directness of a rustic accent or a decorative bent.
Correctly, Indian critic Soumik Nandy Majumdar in an article on the show writes, ‘The new big canvases in particular reveal a grand quality reminiscent of the Mexican murals by Diego Rivera and others who celebrated unabashedly the power and glory of the sweating masses.’
In this show even his signature character Tokai [street urchin] is devoid of frustration. Nabi has created a new dimension of his caricature characters that usually satirise social anomalies. But, in the show, Nabi’s paintings, such as Street Boys and Tokai 2, depict the urchins having fun in life, too, despite living in the street and eating out of garbage bins.
The artist even manifests the joy latent in a number of ugly crows thronging near a garbage bin on a huge canvas titled The Gathering.
‘Every creature has some joyful moment and I want to rejoice in those for the delight of the viewers,’ Rafiqun Nabi told New Age.
Hardly ever have the art aficionados of Dhaka seen a canvas that portrays a father riding a bicycle on a busy road in Dhaka, with his son wearing sunglasses sitting on the rod in front and his happy daughter on the back seat.
A 173cm × 307cm acrylic on canvas titled Fishermen at Rest successfully portrays fishermen in leisure on a sampan [an indigenous boat of the south-east region] by the seashore after a hectic fishing trip out in the sea. Some of the characters are dozing, some playing cards, and some of them smoking hookahs while a loner is playing a flute as if to articulate the bliss and tranquillity of the moment.
Another big canvas sized 170cm × 243cm, At Noon in the Field, features peasants and bulls taking rest in the field. The delicate lines expressing the tranquillity of the souls resting against a background of green shades make the acrylic work unique.
When the media present sufferings of people forced to return home riding on the roof of a train, Nabi’s huge canvas, Rail Station, portrays the satisfaction at securing a place for making the journey home to celebrate a festival with friends and family emitted from the faces seen on the roof of a train standing at a station platform.
His Journey series of landscapes portrays some remote areas of the country, such as diverse places in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, the spectacular Sundarban, and the sublime Cox’s Bazar.
Eminent artist Qayyum Chowdhury inaugurated the exhibition on April 12 as the chief guest. The show ends on April 22.
-With New Age input
