Weekday it was and the traffic on the streets of Dhaka was bad as usual. I was missing my appointment with Qayyum Chowdhury. We have been friends for over half a century. I knew him in his academic years learning the art of painting under the tutelage of the Great Master Zainul Abedin. I watched him emerging as a major painter and graphic designer of Bangladesh. I recognize him now as one of the foremost painters of South Asia. I was going to the sixth floor flat of an apartment block which Qayyum uses exclusively as his studio to have a look at a selection of his paintings that he is preparing to exhibit on his 70th year falling on 9 March. As an old friend, he requested me to write a few words for the brochure of that exhibition to which he gave the title, Flowing Time. Of course, Qayyum does not need any introduction and personally I find it difficult to use the tool of language to talk about works of Art that, to say the obvious, are visual. Instead, I decided to write about our meetings when the time is out of joint and whether in paintings or writings we are working out our reading and understanding of it.

Late by an hour, I stepped into the hallway of his spacious studio-flat and immediately faced a riot of colour from the walls. Indeed, room after room all the walls hung with his paintings, left me stunned with an electric sensation of standing before passionate and at times angry use of space, primary colours and Bengal motifs. I had not known such awe and compulsion emanating from his paintings before.

As Qayyum took me from room to room, and finally to his working area where a canvas was in progress, paints still wet on the palette, it became immediately apparent to me that his vocabulary has changed radically and his vision has now zeroed in ever more than before on the dark socio-political reality of our time. Whereas his earlier paintings left us with the feelings of being in a carnival, whereas his paintings even as late as the year 2000 was taking us to the Bengal folk motifs for its uniquely intrinsic beauty and inviting us to the softness of Bengal idioms, richness of Bengal visual, the green-red-blue of Bengal alluvial plains, Bengal boats with eyes etched on their prows, a recurring image in his painting, signifying the ever-seeing eye of history, now Qayyum has brought in a new vision hitherto unknown to us. It knocked me out of our now settled and expected lyrical grace of his world. I woke up to a new persona in Qayyum, angry and weeping, bleeding and recharging. This new vision of his, as will be evident in this exhibition of his paintings done mostly in 2003, is fiery and angry, compassionate yet critical. Flowing Time is the title he chose to the showing of these paintings. I read Dark Time into it.

The Dark Time is what we will perceive in Qayyum’s latest canvases. Its ferocity, to say the least, will chill us in our bones and by one jerk snatch away our complacency. Yet there are canvases worked with masterly lyrical hand, but as opposed to his past mode, they now have a reverberation, not of nostalgia as Qayyum led us to expect in the past, but of a future day when time will be flowing again with grace and Bangladesh will be back on its track chiseled by the dreams and spirit of the War of Liberation of 1971.

I invite you to my Dark time. I invite you to Qayyum’s Flowing Time. Dark or Flowing, we will perceive in his recent works, I hope, the dark realities of our present time.

Syed Shamsul Haque