Pearls of Imagination

For Syed Iqbal what matters in painting is the emotions it arouses. His images are often disjoined, at times suggestive, at still other times stylized and submerged in apparently abstract compositions. Most of the time, his Images reveal themselves to viewers only after close observation. He thwarts the possibility of a narrative emerging from the images. They work as objective correlatives to his fear and angst; ecstasy and ennui. To borrow from Kandinsky, Iqbal ‘seeks to express only inner, essential feelings.’
He treats his themes in the abstract mode of high modernism, but approaches the surface of his painting in Art Informal manner, experimenting with different materials, combining colour with sand, different modeling paste, textured glue and resin, for example, to create a multi-layered surface to convey a calm beauty. The delicate balance he creates of abstract imagery, and the interplay between powerful hues of exquisite colour and form result in a feast for the eye.
As he places personal feelings at the heart of aesthetic experience his images, associated with individualistic subjectivity, appear elusive and ambiguous. The white-winged blue fairy in Mind the Gap ( 2012) floating in the heavy impasto of blue paint at first glance eludes the eye. But as the viewer’s eye becomes accustomed to the painting, the slender figure of the fairy slowly takes shape in the viewer’s field of vision. The sweeping pale light from an unidentified source and the splotch of red around the pelvic region, indicative of the vagina, give the painting a surreal overtone. Overarching sexual desires take the form of the fairy in the painting, but at the same time we find a yellow border in the right corner which reads ‘mind the gap’ suggesting repression of the desire by our conscious mind.
The internal theatre of the conflict between the subconscious and the conscious has been a consistent theme for Iqbal and he dips his paintbrush in dreamy blue to set up the stage for the play of inner desire and repressed emotions. But his palette oozes with the colours of the rainbow when he expresses his concern for the loss of bio-diversity in the series Tears of Nature. A flurry of primary colours constructs the language of the series. Nature here appears as a sad, gloomy and distorted face of a woman who is integrated into a fantastical amorphous landscape. Visions from his dark imagination dart across the picture surface, like electrical currents. The series rings the bell of the doom of a planet engendered by unsustainable development and loss of bio-diversity.
Iqbal has always looked into himself as the source of his images much like a silkworm which produces silk from its own cocoon. The rich repertoire of his oneiric images made to sink in thick layers of paint and textured surface, is virtually spun from his own cocoon of anxiety, lust, despair and fear.
The current Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts show ‘Colours from the Soul’ reveals the Syed Iqbal we have not seen since 2001. He left for Montreal, Canada that year to start a new life. A year later, he moved to Toronto for a long sojourn that still continuous. In the past 12 years he has visited Dhaka, the city that provided him nourishment for his creative self, on a number of occasions but never to offer a solo exhibition. The importance of the current show thus lies not only in viewers  being able to see Iqbal after a long hiatus, but also to catch up with his recent experiments and look at his exciting new palette shimmering with hues.
Imaginary figures, distorted parts of female body or phantasmagoric imagery have started inhabiting Iqbal’s recent canvasses. The images appear lyrical at times and on other occasions as haunting. Perhaps he is trying to find the meaning of love, sexuality or even failed relationships anew through them. But meaning, as we all know, is always slippery and elusive. This anxiety for meaning runs deep into this recent works.
While groping for a meaning, the best an artist can do is to plumb the depths of the subconscious as an ‘underwater swimmer’ to fish for pearls of imagination. And this is what we see Iqbal doing in his recent works.