Drawing Documents 02 | Other Selves | Moeen faruqi

2

DRAWING DOCUMENTS MOEEN FARUQI

OTHER SELVES

DRAWING DOCUMENTS

Published by the Department of Fine Art Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture In partnership with Vasl Artists’ Collective © 2017 Indus Valley School of Art and Architecure All Rights Reserved Karachi, Pakistan ISBN: 978-969-9343-05-6 Printed by Royal Eastern Offset Design + Documentation by Acute Studio

BY SEHER NAVEED

2

OTHER SELVES MOEEN FARUQI

TEXT BY SEHER NAVEED ESSAY BY ZARMEENE SHAH

FOREWORD

When I visited Moeen Faruqi’s studio in March 2016, I was very impressed with the abundance of drawings he had. I would like to thank him for sharing this body of work which spans over a period of five years with the IVS Gallery. Although selected drawings will be used in this publication, it was a privilege to have seen and worked with all the material provided by Moeen. It was also a pleasure to have Zarmeene Shah contribute to this publication for which we would like to thank her.

This publication would not have been possible without the generous support of its partner, VASL and the hard work put in by Aziza Ahmad, Muniba Rasheed and Saad Khurshid from Acute Studio. We also greatly appreciate the participation of Adeela Suleman, Head of the Department of Fine Art and Samina Raees Khan, Executive Director, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.

WORKING DRAWINGS SEHER NAVEED

Moeen Faruqi’s drawings can be valued for their immediacy and directness and the insight they offer into the process of his paintings. A painter by profession, he has made numerous drawings which vary in size and medium and are predominantly in graphite and pen. His studio is filled with stacks of sketchbooks and loose papers tucked away inside magazines and art books. This suggests that drawing, while important, is a primary stage in his research. ‘I draw regardless. They are pictures that hint at my private doodling’, says Faruqi.1 A much published essay by John Berger, Drawing on Paper, outlines ‘three distinct ways is which drawing can function. There are those which study and question the visible, those which put down and communicate ideas and those done from memory’.2 It is through the second category that one needs to approach Faruqi’s drawings, which he creates with the intention of discovering and interconnecting ideas. In some cases these drawings are self contained and autonomous but are mostly made to help generate greater ideas and “finished works”. These iterations are working drawings for paintings through which scenes are composed and contrived. Although instinctive in nature the sketches are a means of dealing with formal problems. It is through them that Faruqi keeps perfecting the form and anatomy of figures and portraits often seen in his paintings. Each line and tone is important because of what it records and proceeds

to become. Every mark made on paper therefore becomes what Berger would call a ‘stepping stone’.3 Faruqi never went to art school and perhaps for this reason he is extremely fascinated by realistic paintings. Therefore, by sometimes referencing classical and modern paintings, he places a lot of emphasis on the visual and technical aspects of his work. This is evident in many of his drawings, where uninterrupted lines are constantly in dialogue with realism. These sinuous and angled lines frequently resurface on canvas and resolve into paintings or “finished works”.

are void of specific content. They could refer to something he overheard, or read, or words he felt look good when written.

Whether the scribblings work visually is not important to Faruqi. His drawings do not need to make sense to anyone. They are working drawings only for the artist to realize and dismiss while ideating. Artist and theorist, Terry Rosenberg defines this method as a state where drawing will always be in process. The artist does not view his drawings as a form of communication but rather a denkraum - a space where an individual contemplates.6

However, it is important to understand here that both processes of drawing and painting are very different.

In another essay titled, Drawing is Discovery, Berger states that ‘while drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined - a “finished work” is an attempt to construct an event in itself. Each brush-mark is no longer a stepping stone but a stone to be fitted into a planned edifice.4’ There are also some formal aspects that elaborate this distinction between Faruqi’s working drawings and paintings. For instance his paintings may require a longer time to finish and the compositions are not a result of line but demarcations of the coloured surfaces.5 Each canvas can contain multiple layers of strong brush strokes exposing subjects and simultaneously blocking areas alongside pigment-making and tonal rendering. In contrast, his monochromatic drawings are direct and simple and hence very private.

Faruqi’s drawings fulfil his own needs and are not meant for public viewing. While some drawings are a path towards “finished works”, others are fleeting ideas scribbled on paper and spontaneous markings covering his sketchbooks.

Rustomji, Veera. Interview with Moeen Faruqi. Moeen Faruqi.

Art Now Pakistan, accessed July 16, 2016. http://www.artnowpakistan.com/moeen-faruqi/.

1

Berger, John, “Drawing on Paper” in Berger on Drawing, ed.

Jim Savage, Occasional Press; 2nd edition, 2007.

2

Berger, John, “John Berger: Drawing is Discovery”, New Statesman, accessed August 5, 2016. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/art-and-design/2013/05/john-berger-drawing-discovery.

3

Berger, John, “John Berger: Drawing is Discovery”, New Statesman, accessed August 5, 2016. http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/art-and-design/2013/05/john-berger-drawing-discovery.

4

Alphen, Ernst Van, “Looking at Drawing: Theoretical Distinctions and their Uselfulness” in Writing on Drawing, Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, ed. Stever Garner. Intellect Books (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 67.

5

The act of drawing is so personal to Faruqi that it is reflected in the use of text in his sketches. In his twenty years of painting, text has never appeared on his canvases and remains confined to his diaries and drawings where it is not used for image building or texture. In fact scribbling is a habit for Faruqi who is also a poet of the English language. He enjoys the act of writing and the text we see doodled in his drawings

Rosenberg, Terry, “New Beginnings and Monstrous Births: Notes Towards an Appreciation of Ideational Drawing” in Writing on Drawing, Essays on Drawing Practice and Research, ed.

Stever Garner. Intellect Books (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 123.

6

THE LINES BETWEEN ZARMEENE SHAH

“Drawing is the first visible form in my works...the first visible thing of the form of the thought, the changing point from the invisible powers to the visible thing.”

(Joseph Beuys, 1984) Perhaps one of the most inclusive, intimate forms of practice, drawing has enjoyed a kind of resurgence in the 21st century, becoming one of the most fluid and expanded fields of exploration and discourse in contemporary art today. While many artists focus on the medium of drawing as their primary mode of investigation, it is exactly this quality – the investigative – that makes this practice critical in the primary act of engagement with ideas and concepts, whether employed as the dominant medium or not.

Where artist Rachel Whiteread may best be known for her large-scale, evocative, memory-based sculptural works, the act of drawing remains as a pivotal component of her process. Similarly, but perhaps deployed in a different manner, arrived at from a different route are the often process-based drawings of artists such as Joseph Beuys or of sculptor Richard Serra, which explore form and structure albeit often in the stark minimalism of the mark and the line through which issues of lightness, weight and form are all actualized; or conversely, the beautifully rendered and detailed investigations of

Christo and Jean-Paul, which articulate the depth of research, idea and thought while simultaneously acting as a proposal for projects yet to be initiated.

Contemporary discourses around drawing acknowledge and take into full account the impact of the vast proliferation of modern technologies such as photography, film, video and internet-based mediums, which have led to expanded understandings and investigations in the field.

However, it is perhaps the immediacy of the act of drawing, the intimacy of the idea first made visible, and the route that it allows into a personal space that one may not be otherwise privy to, that has fascinated both artists and audiences not just today, but for centuries. In this context, objects such as the artists’ sketchbook/notebook become perhaps the most sustained of activities as well as the most compelling of routes into the practice of an artist whose thought process bares itself, pure, immediate and unadulterated, in this small, often undisclosed (to the public) space. Just as the drawings, sketchbooks and notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci provide a route into the understanding of the man, the diary of Frida Kahlo gives us the raw, felt, experiential view of the artist’s life and inner world that lends a previously inaccessible depth to the ‘formal’ works.

This intuitive, investigative act of mark making, that often simultaneously encompasses both working process as well as the personal, is then perhaps able to bring to us unprecedented understandings of the links between private and public, praxis and practice.

It is through this framework that one approaches the drawings of Moeen Faruqi. His work speaks of the city, and of urban life, while creating a document that is simultaneously intensely personal. Faruqi’s works span over a decade – small, intuitive, line-based drawings done in notebooks that describe domestic (urban) interiors populated by characters that seem to hold between them the weight of personal relationships, despite the fragility of the line that traces them. Seeming to reflect this, the mode of display speaks the same language of lightness, the sheets of paper taken from the books taped simply to the walls, unencumbered by the weight of the frame and of the formality that it brings with it, allowing them to be what they are: intuitive private documents of idea, thought and process.

“Drawing is valued as an image generator, as a means of improvising, and as a register of social, political, and cultural commentary. Drawing is capable of mapping both the visible and invisible worlds, of recording intensely private moments, of conveying ideas of time and space, and of telling stories.”

The stories in Moeen Faruqi’s work are always about the urban, about his own contemporary context, and always between the public and the private. Occupying interior spaces, he says of his characters that they are “you and me, the people that we are, the people that we meet and engage with every day.” There is however an implied and understood signification here: the ‘you and me’, the characters within the urban narratives of our lives, also implicates, or at least calls to light, a certain class privilege (and therefore also the same discrepancy). ‘We’ then become the members of a certain class structure, whose lives are mainly conducted and whose encounters mostly take place within the privacy of their refined and carefully curated homes – people who could be anyone, whose context is not so much of

location as it is of their relationship with the urban, in spaces that could be anywhere in the world. Worlds however, that are only accessible to those ‘like us’.

In the first half of the 20th century (bourgeois) writers of modern life such as Walter Benjamin saw writing as a means to convey their critical and political views, as a voice through which they could communicate the plight of the masses, to stand with the proletariat. To stand with the proletariat however necessarily sets up its opposite condition: that one is not of the proletariat. Of this last fact, Moeen Faruqi stands keenly aware, and with this awareness, his work performs the opposite function: by speaking of that which is not the proletariat, he has already invoked them in absentia.

Faruqi’s drawings then become as a route into the ideas deployed within his larger practice. However, emptied of color, of the mass, the weight given by its demarcations and opacities, these seem to carry a deeper sense of the alienation to which he often refers; a sense of “unbelonging” in the context of the place in which one is located, leading to a focus on human encounter, on containment and on separation. The presence of the fish denotes the same, versus its multitudes of symbolic interpretations over time, this one is simple: the fish out of water, somewhere it does not belong. The quality of the line, fine and fragile, sometimes wavering, lost in thought, other times surer, more urgent, adds to a certain haunted quality that speaks of the alienation and loneliness of life in the densely populated metropolis, even though the delicate lines fill the page, form after form, creating spaces and encounters, relationships and moments, all drawn up from the memory – or the imagination, which links to the memory in order to create images that occupy the space between the real and the envisioned.

These arenas, almost like the cinematic stills of a continued narrative unchangingly uninterrupted over the span of years, are however populated by more than just images. Text overflows, sometimes moving over the image, sometimes being the sole occupant of the white

page. Personal observations, prose, thoughts, encounters, relationships, emotions, investigations, all are present here. However, it is in the ‘accidental’ notes, the reminders to oneself of art materials and groceries to buy, the unidentified mobile phone number hurriedly jotted down on the first available surface, and even in the labeled demarcations of color (red, blue, yellow) on compositions that are clearly the result of a thought process towards a painting, in the banality of the everyday, that one finds the indexical sign in the image, and simultaneously the signature, the trace of the artist.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’ critical analytical text on photography, he speaks of an almost elusive element within the frame, which he refers to as the punctum, the opposite of the studium which contains the range of obvious meanings and interpretations that the image aims of represent. The punctum, however, is other than this focal point, a detail within the work that contains an intensely private meaning, almost accidentally given away. This element is that which is unexpectedly recognized in a moment and consequently remembered as a vehicle of poignancy in the image. It “shoots out of [the photograph] like an arrow and pierces me...” “However lightning-like it may be,the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion.”

“[O]ccasionally (but alas all too rarely) a ‘detail’ attracts me. I feel that its mere presence changes my reading, that I am looking at a new photograph, marked in my eyes with a higher value.

This detail is the punctum.”

In Faruqi’s work then, it is exactly these ‘accidental’ details that are able to suddenly ‘shoot out of’ the image and expand its meanings, and its inferences, and to allow for newer, more personal relationships to emerge.

Through these ‘details’ the artist suddenly arises, almost tangible in his presence, made visible and somehow poignantly real through the mundaneness of the everyday that evokes him.

Examined carefully, these drawings (which are amongst at least hundreds scattered, stacked, stored in the artist’s studio) then become the key into the work of Moeen Faruqi; a point of accessibility that opens up a new field of understanding where the ‘formal’ painting works stop. Where these often summon a sense of the cinematic still, moments caught in time and space, the drawings seem to form the continuing narrative, the link that sets the stills into motion and open up new ways of entering into and engaging with the work, with drawing as idea and process, and indeed with the artist himself.

1 Temkin, Ann and Bernice Rose, Thinking Is Form: The Drawings of Joseph Beuys, Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1993, p. 73.

Remarks made during an interview with the author, June 18, 1984.

Sale, Teel and Claudia Betti, Drawing: A Contemporary Approach (6th edition). Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2008, p.

240 2

Barthes, Roland, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, New York, 1982, p. 43 3

Moeen Faruqi (b. 1958, Karachi, Pakistan) Moeen Faruqi is an artist and writer living in Karachi.

His paintings have been exhibited widely within Pakistan and internationally in Canada, Italy, Singapore, Bangladesh, UK and India. His poems have been published in various literary journals in Pakistan and abroad.

LIST OF WORKS

7.

Untitled Pen on Paper (Karachi Literature Festival Brochure) 8.26”x11.69”

8.

Untitled Pen on Paper 8.26”x11.69”

1. (Front and Back cover) Untitled Pencil on paper 10.69”x15”

2.

Untitled Acrylic on Canvas Paper 5.2”x6”

9.

Untitled Pen on Paper 8.26”x11.69”

10.

Untitled Pen on Paper 8.26”x11.69”

3.

Untitled Stamp, Pen and Ink on paper 8.26”x11.69”

4.

The Third Man Acrylic on Canvas, 30”x44” (Exhibited in ‘New Paintings’, Canvas Gallery, Karachi, 2016)

11.

Untitled Ink on Paper 10.69”x15”

12.

Untitled Pen on paper (Karachi Literature Festival Brochure) 8.26”x11.69”

5.

Untitled Pen on Paper 8.26”x11.69”

6.

Untitled Pen on Paper 8.26”x11.69”

13.

Untitled Pencil on Paper 8.26”x11.69”

14. and 15.

Untitled Pen on Paper 11.69”x16.53” (total size)

16. and 17.

Untitled Collage and Pencil on Paper 11.69”x16.53” (total size)

18. and 19.

Untitled. No. 19 drawing made by Ziyad Faruqi (Age 6) Pencil on Paper 11.69”x16.53” (total size)

26.

Untitled Pen on paper 8.26”x11.69”

27.

Untitled Pencil on paper 8.26”x11.69”

20.

Untitled Pen on paper 8.26”x11.69”

21.

Untitled Pen on paper 8.26”x11.69”

28.

Untitled Pen on paper 8.26”x11.69”

29.

Untitled Pencil on paper 8.26”x11.69”

22.

Untitled Pen and Ink on paper 8.26”x11.69”

23.

Untitled Pen on paper 5.2”x8.26”

30.

Untitled Pen on paper 8.26”x11.69”

31.

Untitled Pencil on paper 8.26”x11.69”

24.

Untitled Pen on paper (V.M Gallery Agenda Sheet) 8.26”x11.69”

25.

Untitled Mixed Media on Paper 8.26”x11.69”

32.

Moeen Faruqi in his studio August 2016, Karachi

Drawing Documents Department of Fine Art