Between the Lines; Pakistan artist’s first solo in Delhi

Md Ali Talpur and some of his works on display

The black and whites project an orderly chaos within a linear pattern. The brush dances to paint designs reminiscent of Dutch graphic artist MC Escher’s, in which there is method within madness and engrossing grid formations. “It’s like chanting,” says Mohammad Ali Talpur. The Pakistani artist’s first solo in the Capital represents him — the minimalist who immerses himself in clusters of lines.

The representations were not the most obvious path for Talpur to follow after obtaining his Masters degree in Fine Arts from College of Arts in Lahore in 2001. Three years later on an otherwise idle day, Talpur began tracing the flight paths of birds with a felt tip on paper from the rooftop of his studio. Linear patterns emerged and the engagement followed a two-year course in calligraphy, between 2009 and 2010, where the artist picked up the science behind the skill. “There is so much precision required to write each alphabet. Each curve is important,” notes the 38-year-old artist.

With the current exhibition at Latitude 28, he celebrates the word alif, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. “It’s the starting point of a rich language and I intend to explore the many possibilities that a beginning can have,” says Talpur about the collection where at times “the words dissolve into pure geometrical forms”.

In some of the smaller canvases he attempts at converting sound waves, spoken words heard over a radio, into a visual language on a canvas. “As the words were being spoken on the radio, I was trying to put them on canvas. My speed didn’t match that of the speech so these words are disjointed,” he says. The outcome is, once again, a maze of patterns where each finds a different design.

The exhibition at Latitude 28, F-208, Lado Sarai, is on till October 12.
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