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FINE ART

By Gregory Minissale

Patri-art

Although some of our artists may be accused of being frivolous, never let it be said that Ozzir Zuby is one of them. With painful seriousness, Zuby has rallied his art round the flag in Pakistan's darkest hour, with cries of unity, solidarity and integrity.

Although some cynics have been heard labeling Zuby's attempts to salute the flag with his brush as a farcical kind of gravity, one should at least give him credit for his enterprising spirit. Not all of us have been able to hone our creative energy into picking up the scraps of war hysteria off the media table, to make such a good meal of it.

True, qaumi naghmas on PTV tend to have backdrops of a remarkably similar kind to Zuby's paintings, but this cannot detract from Zuby's sense of self-importance and grandeur. With a striking (some more delicate constitutions would say gaudy) palette, Mr. Zuby has conjured up a magical world of Bappi Lahiri props and brightly coloured baubles. This cheery abandon does not, however, clash with Mr. Zuby's grim intent: to advertise a robust, stout and rather spartan patriotism. The rather obvious linchpin of the series is the tree motif. Zuby's remarkable contribution to poetry, symbolism and art is the notion that the four provinces of Pakistan are (or should be) like branches of a tree or trunks in a forest. Although this cosiness is at times entertaining (especially given the backdrop of interior Sindh, Balochistan and Karachi) the four-into-one motif does wear a little thin over thirty pictures. Even glimpses of the Quaid-i-Azam's mazaar and the Pakistan flag cannot divert the parade-like rhythm of the exhibition.

If Zuby has missed the complexities of perception (the relationship between the picture and the viewer, whatever it might be, can never be reduced to a mechanical salute) there will, of course, be those who relish the flavour (and the subtle imperatives) of a patriotic marchpast.

But perhaps, as one old war veteran was overheard saying, true patriotism does not lie in waving flags and shouting 'Pakistan Zindabad' but in loving the literature, art, music ethos, of all the provinces, not the idol worship of an emblem alone. In this respect, Mr Zuby does his art and his patriotism, a disservice. Anyone who has ever nurtured a placid aestheticism (



dictum that art has no boundaries') should wilt at the [[?]]oisting of this monosyllabic art.

Included in the other rooms of the Indus Gallery are monochrome drawings and a few paintings of mother and child - and although these two might be said to be a little populist, they are occasionally pleasing to the eye and decidedly less strident and shrill that the main corpus of

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