Ziaul Karim

Gunnysacks ravaged by time and discarded as waste, roughly sewn together and heavily splashed with paint, construct a fiercely lyrical vision of beauty and decay in Kazi Sayed’s paintings. He enjoys experimenting with surface and has shown an obsessive interest in texture and slow-moving rather than rapidly activated form.

Sayed’s canvas, dense and loaded with images and materials associated with his childhood, complements in an interesting way to the painting of images of discarded wooden boxes and charred wood planks done by Sarkar Nahid Niazi (Nipu), his wife. The viewer of the current show will get to see the creations of this couple together (though their works have been seen separately often) for the first time in the city to discover their common interest in materials that have been ravaged by time and discarded as waste and will get to contemplate on the different manner in which they approach their subjects.

Kazi Sayed grew up in the city’s Shyambazar area, where spices, onions, and vegetables have been traded for ages and where scores of godowns, skirting the area, provide storage facilities for traders. Supplies for this wholesale market have always come here from different parts of the country in yellow ochre jute gunnysacks.

The hullabaloo that is so distinctive a feature of the market, especially the noise of its porters loading and unloading large jute sacks, inhabit the canvas of Kazi Sayed’s subconscious.

Sayed’s family has been in the bakery business for a long time. It is a business which consumes loads of potato, sugar, and flour that are dispatched and delivered in large jute sacks of different shapes and sizes, often worn-out by time and inevitably therefore in repaired and roughly stitched condition.

While collecting and preserving lacerated jute gunnysacks or burlaps discarded as waste from godowns or food factories found in the area and making them the stuff of his artwork has become Sayed’s passion, Nipu was engrossed in the colour and cadence of wooden boxes and planks.  Amazingly, they have found their language of expression in these seemingly banal, discarded objects and have transformed them into works of art!

The scent wafting from the bakery, the sight of workers kneading dough, the sense of touch activated in contact with the sacks, the sounds of this area of godowns and wholesale markets, and images of discarded boxes have all been condensed and captured in the images or symbolism of Sayed and Nipu’s canvas. They have, indeed, become the leitmotif of their works. Just as amazingly, their paintings appeal endlessly to our senses of sight, scent, and touch.

For them the medium is the message. Their concern with creating images of worn-out wooden boxes or breaking the surface, building up layers and allowing the paint underneath the burlap patches to peep through give their painting a dimension that is sculptural. The sinews of their works lie in their ability to evoke a many-layered, mysterious, dreamlike feeling; for sure their canvases resist linear interpretation.

In the 2002 ‘Reconstruction’ series, for instance, three pieces of torn jute rags, two of them painted green and red and stitched to each other, are pasted on the canvas. Among these tatters and patches are occasional holes that reveal the thickly painted ground below, creating a tension between presence and absence. The paints beneath the collage of gunny bags reveal themselves to our eyes only after careful observation. The sacking draws one close while the paint underneath lie suggestively and liminally–like the subconscious underlying the obvious parts of the canvas.  Condensed into and balanced across the canvas, Sayed’s sense of scale is impeccable.

For an artist memories and imagination are the fountainhead of images and symbols. Not surprisingly, for Sayed and Nipu they form the bedrock of their work. The vitality and vigour of the remembered scenes of the past make the language and idiom of their unique canvas.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume distinguished between memory and imagination, making them separate faculties of mental impression. He further clarified their characteristics  and described them in terms of force and vivacity. Hume privileged memory and found its firmer brighter impression more appealing than the fainter, languid picture conjured by the imagination. But with this couple, imagination and memory coalesce into a texture that evokes both memory and imagination, stimulating the spectator’s senses immensely in the process.

Both Sayed and Nipu are against interpretation, and more or less everything except the space of their canvas and the territory covered by the art work. They are for creating a mood whereby the viewer will be overwhelmed by the infinite play between the signifier and the signified.

The layering of sacks on sacks gives Sayed’s canvas a three-dimensional sweep. His treatment of sacks ravaged by time, retrieved from waste bins and patched together to reconstruct memories from his past and give meaning to his relationship to his environment reminds one  of Lacan’s dictum that the unconscious is structured like a language. His collage method also recalls the notion that one of the basic poles of language, as identified by the linguist Roman Jakobson, is metonymy.

In metonymy one thing represents another; the part stands for the whole. In dreams, as well, an element might stand for something else through what Freud said displacement. The worn-out sacks and burlaps in Sayed’s case evoke childhood memories and the unique ambience of Shyambazar. As if informed by the philosophy of the Art Informel movement–the school of abstract art of post-war Europe—his canvas rejects conventional ideas of composition and turn to new materials for inspiration.

Sayed has frequently been compared to Alberto Burri, the celebrated practitioner of art informel, who is best known for his use of burlap and other foreign matter often joined with generous areas of red paint. The results were often reminiscent of blood-stained bandages. In their torn and scarred state they became poignant commentaries on the death and destruction caused in the Second World War. However, the works Sayed has created are different in essence from those of Burri.

Burri is somber and morbid. Sayed, on the other hand, transforms the rubbish of sacks, stitching and layering them one on the other into works of celebration, not of a thing or a single idea but of the expressive labyrinthine landscape of being.

The broken and lacerated wooden boxes in Shyambazar and the nearby Katpatti, market used for selling all sorts of wooden planks or boxes, began to fascinate Nipu while she was dating Kazi Sayed and looking for subjects for classroom studies.

Nipu’s images of wooden planks, discarded wooden shutters or boxes with their delicate shapes and interrelationships evoke feelings of desolation and testify to the ravages wrought by time. Her obsession with composition and their relationship with each other engender interpretations on the complexity of human relationships, especially of conjugal life.

Sayed’s recent work expresses a predilection for bright hues, unfamiliar dreamlike shapes and forms. Nipu seems engrossed in interpreting the grain of wood planks, their inner texture and mystery.

Intimate, delicate, and poignant, the works of the couple seem to be located at the intersection of beauty and decay!