A picture paints a thousand words and who would know this better than the artist himself? Perhaps that’s why, Riaz Samadhan chose to write an entire diary on his canvas, letting his brush do all the talking. The series of paintings are a picture of the artist’s mindscape — the plethora of emotions he has experienced, the people who have impacted him, the memories that he holds close and so on. The depictions are on both levels — the conscious and the unconscious, he says. “It is, in essence, my personal diary that is a record of my own observations of the people and places around me,” says Riaz.
Although superficially, the artworks might exude a feeling of the abstract, Riaz classifies them as “figurative-conceptual”.
“Each of my paintings are concept oriented and the central theme of realism forms the common vein in my work.” In his own words, the artist has tried to break free from the dark theme of his previous works where he had tried to highlight the evils of a commercialised world. “Some of my paintings have addressed some issues, although that wasn’t the intention. I guess it was a play of the subconscious,” says Riaz. “For instance, in my work Where The Blue Prints Are More Important Than The Footprints Of Ancestors, I have tried to tell the story of a man who has sold a piece of land in his village to buy a house for his son in the city. It shows how constant changes have slowly eroded the old and the traditional, where people leave behind their ancestral abodes in search for a “better” life in the city,” he adds.
The Shadow Of A Dried Tree is again a realistic experience of the emptiness of life told through the eyes of an old woman who is overshadowed by a dead tree in the background. The upside down depiction of a house is symbolic of her uprooted life, with a seed inside it, which expresses the part of her life she never ended up living. “I have tried to render life the way it is. So whether it is happiness and positivity, or fears and insecurity — they are all a part of my diary,” says Riaz. Quiz the artist on the treatment of geometric dissection that nearly forms a leitmotif in this series of paintings, and he says, “The squares depict limitations — the human tendency of bracketing things and limiting thought. In some paintings I have used lines as well, such as in Crescent Of The Moon, which stand for the connection between people and things,” he says. There are deep spiritual overtones in his work and shades of it can be seen in Dichotomy. “I have tried to show the oneness of life and death through the motif of a larvae,” says the artist who is also a believer of Osho.
“My paintings may not seem harmonious but my prime object was to communicate my thoughts, which I have accomplished, to an extent,” says Riaz. The superficial incoherence, however, may be attributed to the artistic pursuit of the project itself, as Riaz goes on to explain. “When you write a diary, you merely scribble your thoughts in a random manner, without a care to construct them within a coherent narrative. The same applies to these paintings as well, where I was struck with a range of ideas and I went about translating them with my paintbrush,” he says.
Riaz took nearly one-and-a-half years to complete his diary. “I started with a sketch, discarded it and then went back to it again. The pattern repeated itself several times before I arrived at what you see on canvas today, he says, adding, “The best part was that I was never sure of the outcome, so there was a question mark throughout my pursuit which made the journey all the more intriguing and enjoyable,” he says.
For someone who was seeped in applied commercial arts in the advertising industry, the transition to fine arts didn’t come easy. “But I used to sketch regularly and dedicate a lot of time to painterly practices. Though my style is modern, my techniques are still traditional — I am a great admirer of the works of Monet and John Singer Sargent. I like to work in multiple layers, rather than restrict myself to simplistic painting,” says Riaz who also likes the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol.
The exhibition is on at the Museum Art Gallery, Fort from December 5 to December 11