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INDIAN EXPRESS, NEW DELHI, Wednesday, January 15, 1986

Art

Zarina Hashmi's works on view

It is after almost a decade, Zarina Hashmi's works are on view at the Art Heritage gallery. Already a noted graphic artist when she left India, Zarina has always been wary of obvious visual metaphors in her works and now, the old reticence is still there, flowing from her works of the early and mid-seventies into her etchings, lithographs and cast paper done in the eighties. 

In her building of image of an image, thrice removed from the world of forms and colours around her, Zarina may have been playing with hair-thin vein of satire, or a kind of mocking smile, hidden behind her sleeves, at the futility of representing the multi-calent, multi-dimensional reality on the two-dimensional surfaces.

On embossed paper surfaces, silken thread appear in warps and welts, sometimes sewing up the white, and leaving behind loose ends; or the embossed surface is perforated with needle, creating a pattern— and all these move towards a feel of the tactile just when the visual play of white on white tends to come to a halt.

Or perhaps, it is the futility of the whole game they call the 'visual arts'? But then, in her cast paper pieces, she has moved towards the sculptural. This, again, is not the sculpture but the paper image of the sculptor, subtly and deliberately confusing the senses, reversing their order, suggesting weight by painting them iron-grey, but really offering something very light and fragile.

Ceaseless polemics seem to have been going on, questioning the basic rationale of using the materials for visual expression. Yet, the cast per 'Shelter', the 'Thousand Nights Away' in amboss and frottage, and the 'emory of Bangkok' seem to assume a pictorial quality in the usual sense of the term, and perhaps may yield some scraps of the poetic if one insists on having them. 

After all these ears, Zarina, like the badger in Kafka's story (The Burrow), is still busy in keeping the world out, the reality of which does not find expression only in naturalistic representation. But then, this is hardly any news to Zarina Hashim.

On view till January 23.

Santo Datta