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PARABLES OF OUR TIMES:

Musings on the works of Mahbubur Rahman and Tayeba Lipi

I have known Mahbub and Lipi since when they were literally artists in the making. They were refreshingly spontaneous, boldly expressive - even irreverent.

Because they were young and unabashed about what moved them and how they responded to these impulses from within and without, it was possible for someone who engaged with them to “read” them, so to speak. Over the last close to two decades, they have retained their refreshing disposition and vibrancy, principally because they have continued to explore, challenge and assimilate; and in the process, to reinvent their fortes. Initially, while their repertoire, despite individual traits, the potential of the visual form, their creative work today is shaped by intellection, conviction, a sense of values of sorts, and more.

Mahbub impressed me from the beginning as what I would call the Bacchic. Despite his solid grounding in academic work, especially in drawing, he exhibited a natural tendency to focus his creative élan on the not so ordered, not so predictable, not the delicate, indeed sometime the bizarre. Many could find his work difficult to categorise – he moves from painting to sculpture, or simply to impart value to space or to objects and how they are ordered. His aesthetic immersion has been in the apparently disorderly, connecting with and creating meaning from the unexpected and the unusual, creating breathtaking images and installations. And more importantly, leading us through that intense process of intellection.

Mahbub, even in his very early days, had begun to make a mark in sculpture. He was already demonstrating an absolute control over the human form, and was capable of reading into shapes and composition nuances of remarkable depth. Even then, one could see how the dark and the light fascinated him. His drawing skill was exceptionally good and there was a maturity in his use of colours. His magnum opus, I remember, was his Time in a Limbo series. His fascination was in the decadence and frustrations of the age which he captured with ease. He demonstrated, however, a capacity for inexhaustible optimism and managed to infuse a positive note in his works. His use of jaundiced shades break into vital shades of rouge and interesting tones of blue and green.

Lipi on the other hand, has been more reflective, expressive in a quiet manner – more the Apollonian to Mahbub’s Bacchic. In her early days, Lipi celebrated the eyes, and her paintings looked beyond the obvious, tracing hidden meanings and messages in delicate and subtle undertones. Her treatment of the canvas, her exploration of the potential of the human form and a very creative use of colours, especially the remarkable tonality and how she treats them, give her works a very personalized stamp.

I specially recall her brilliant autographical, but superbly dispassionate work that my juror colleagues for the Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh had decided to award the Grand Prize. In juxtaposing images of the dolls of her childhood on her own image, she harked back to her childhood, but presented a many-nuanced reality delicately crafted. One can read the ambivalence in the images, both of nostalgia and of muted protest of her own experience in the journey from girlhood through adolescence and into womanhood. The execution of this brilliant piece was done with extraordinary ease and attention to little details that are not apparent at first sight. Her style endeavours and draws the outsider visually, and then engages, more importantly, intellectually.

Mahbub and Lipi however, have never really become dated, because of an endless effort to add value to their repertoire. Britto and its network have decidedly helped in this through numerous residencies and workshops etc. at home and abroad. But more interestingly, they appear also to have drawn from each other’s style and aesthetic disposition. Today, we find Lipi’s works adopting, perhaps unknowingly, Mahbub’s influence - a desire to be forcefully expressive, although her particular strengths as an artist of the subtle remain. Likewise, we find Mahbub has tried in his evocative expressiveness to borrow from the reflective forte of Lipi’s, despite his profusion of installations, his angst and use of self as art.

I present these two talented young artists from Bangladesh and this exhibition - “Parables of Our Times” with a sense of personal pleasure. Their works are packed in meaning - alluding, challenging and opening eyes; and hence parables. The angst, the sublimity, and an interesting capacity to blend the autobiographical with the collective provide a distinctive narrative of our times. With their contemporaries, Mahbub and Lipi may well be on way to creating the new rhetoric of our times. .

MIJARUL QUAYES