The Important Quality of Imran Qureshi

(At the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Qureshi's Rooftop Garden Commission)

Given my predilections in art, I should have been greatly enamoured of Indian miniature paintings (whether Mughal or Rajput). After all they exhibited very modern techniques, foreshortening, flattening, bold usage of colour, abstract shapes and stylised idioms that combined tradition and modernity in radical ways. And yet I avoided them with a vehemence that surprises even me. Maybe it had to do with the smallness of scale — no large murals like a Chagall or Matisse that could overwhelm you at first sight. On reflection I think it had much more to do with the themes that these paintings were about — love scenes from the Krishna leela (which perhaps were a bit embarrassing at a particular age); religious scenes (which conflicted with the atheist posture that I had adopted); or maudlin renditions of ragas (abstract though the concept was, the personification seemed plain silly); or scenes from royal lives (which didn’t square with my republican instincts), particularly the hunting scenes (which also involved cruelty to animals). Having excluded most of these due to my youthful prejudices, all I was effectively left with were stylistic vines, vases, falcons and some nature scenes. And absent from these was a vibrant sense of life, of modern, contemporary life in particular.

Most modern Indian painters, and perhaps those from the subcontinent, have tried to use conceptual ideas, vocabularies and techniques from modern western art, while incorporating Indian themes. Just one such example is Hebbar’s line drawings of classical dancers and musicians. There have also been many novel and dramatic works that address modern Indian life. A friend of my parents, the painter Sarangan, used to use South Indian kitchen implements to press paints into stylistic depictions of Vaishnav symbols — or nudes with equal facility.

But few if any of these artists have used a traditional form and techniques from the past centuries such as those used in Mughal miniature paintings to depict quotidian, secular life. Which is what makes Imran Qureshi so significant as an artist. He presents an entirely fresh answer to the question of what constitutes a modern Miniature painting (at least in the subcontinental context). His small paintings embrace the format of the miniature — a single central figure around which there is a constellation of abstract decorative elements, foliage mainly, yielding a composition that is understood to be a significant episode in a narrative. Qureshi’s genius is to use masterly technique, a completely modern yet anachronistic central figure, and a completely secular unsentimental narrative. The Moderate Enlightenment series, particularly that of a bearded youth with bare upper body exercising with a pair of dumbbells or another pulling off his vest, is a sensuous, rich and path-breaking series of paintings. It immediately connects 21st century Pakistan, modern yet Islamicised, to an Indo-Persian traditional art form, linking the banality of everyday lower middle-class life to a 7th century ethos. And yet being figuratively secular and avoiding dramatic or religious themes.       

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I am glad I was able to see paintings from this series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The special exhibit was, of course, his Metropolitan Museum of Art rooftop garden commission which involved red paint spattered across the roof, as if some carnage had occurred there. But a closer look showed delicate brushwork, where the spattered paint had been feathered into leaves and petals. The overall effect, however, was underwhelming for two reasons: Upper-class New York around Central Park is too bloodless and effete and too removed from daily conflicts for the work to resonate as a socio-political statement. And to a subcontinental, the floor looked like just so much paan thook in a carefully chosen pantone shade. Blood or betel spit, “spatter either way” remarked a brilliant friend of mine.     

But the Moderate Enlightenment series of miniatures a floor below revealed a playfulness, humour and above all, terrific technique involving wasli paper, gold leaf, gouache and watercolours, acrylic paints, bleached negative images of scissors, collages with zippers and fabric (military fatigues in Artillery Pantaloons). It’s that humour, small and witty asides which seem altogether appropriate in a miniature, that make Qureshi so interesting. Rather than his larger site-specific installations that tend to be more single-minded and obvious in their message, such as the rooftop commission or And They Still Seek the Traces of Blood (though they show how he is able to apply the same precision of technique used for miniatures in large works of art too).

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