Reflections of known and unknown
Nadeem Zuberi
Zahid Mehmood Mayo is a talented budding artist who experiments old values and styles in new ways thus reflecting realities around him with different perspectives. In his recent series of paintings titled ‘Begaaniyan Moortan De Anjaane Vaasi’ exhibited at Sanat Gallery, Karachi he explored the old historical events and characters from the famous works of the western artists and juxtaposed them in his compositions thus recreated them in a new mode to produce works that were distinctly local in nature but unique enough to be categorize as a style of his own.
Graduated from National College of Arts, Lahore Zahid’s canvases depicted borrowed scenes from famous and known old paintings that inspired him and they seemed relevant in present times also because of their similarities in various situations and occasions that we encounter nowadays world over. These happenings in different parts of the world were interrelated with each other thus the series of events form a story that were narrated by Zahid in his paintings.
He has taken full advantage of current situations and the historical events that blend well in his works. It seemed as if history is repeating itself in many different ways giving an opportunity to Zahid to use his creativity and invent new methods to convey his ideas, feelings, views, experiences and emotions.
He used his sensibilities to uncover and discover the relation between the past and the present. He reflected the known and unknown realities in his paintings thus imparting knowledge what had occurred in the past is still among us and we are still dealing with the same situations and circumstances.
We thought ourselves a developed world but in a wider aspect we are still standing on the starting point hoping to cross the finish line. Hence he interpreted things, people and happenings around him in his paintings with reference to the past.
He played with the facial expressions and gestures of the figures along with addition of symbolic objects to convey his message more clearly to the masses. He manipulated visual experience of a viewer to achieve his goal.
He produced maximum impact with minimal strokes creating crowds in many of his paintings in this series. In the form of crowd he wanted to show the response of our society on certain issues especially issues related to women. He discussed how the status of women remained unchanged through centuries by depicting current happenings in past context. His paintings discussed in detail the circumstances and reasons of occasions to brought meaningfulness to the characters of his paintings.
Zahid focused on the state and status of women, through history, art and in our culture in the current series of paintings. A painting portrayed a scene of a funeral showed silhouettes of women wearing headscarves and holding the coffin of their deceased sister. But according to tradition females do not accompany men who carry coffin to its eternal adobe, the grave. The painting reflected an incident reported from Afghanistan where men refused to participate in the last rites of a woman who was accused of adultery, so it were women who led her funeral procession, finally followed by men.
The environment of competition between TV channels and social media to exceed one another in ratings has become nuisance for the society. This rage of channels and social media has engulfed many lives around the globe. The desire to be number one pushed reporters to find sensational news for their respective channels. And for achieving this goal sometimes they go to an extend that resulted in a disastrous tragedy.
Thus media play a big role in grooming our society nowadays. In a painting Zahid included a small selfie stick next to the heroic figure of ‘Liberty’ he used as a symbol for heroic women showed the influence of media in our society.
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