Creatively calligraphed

Lahore based artist Mohammad Ali Talpur explores the many facets of a single word.

Alif, the first word in the Arabo-Persian script, the letter that stands for literacy and knowledge and is the revealed word, is an epitome of divine simplicity. A single vertical line, alif or aleph is the mystical line that unites the mundane with the sacred, with this world and the one above us, it rises to meet the ultimate reality. Mohammad Ali Talpur, an artist from Lahore, seeks to use the minimalism and linearity of alif in his latest show at Latitude 28.

In calligraphy the lines stand out against the stark surface of the paper or cloth scroll with the ink or siyahi inscribing meaning onto the blank surface, interrupting the light with the dark. The spiritual and visual interpretations of this intersection can be varied; it is like the body etching itself on the soul, the human on the divine, and the explicit on the unsaid. Pictorially the strength of the line itself, its relationship with other lines as well as the surface is a significant element in Talpur’s works.

In many of his works, Talpur’s use of the script is usually not calligraphic in the image it invokes; interestingly it reminds one of bytes or bar codes, a very digital use of the line that inscribes a thing’s or a person’s identity through a series of straight lines.

In another work, that simulates calligraphic writing in nastaliq style, the lines are marked by the absence of nuqtas, thus robbing them of content and actualized meaning. Here the artist uses the lines of like figures in various yogic exercise postures.

Mohammad Ali Talpur began exploring the lines by tracing the flight path of birds with a felt tip on paper and this led him to dwell on the possibility of the line, straight and curved both. Looking at the works one feels that his works are an abstraction of the word as well as forms without necessarily infusing these with exactitude of meaning.

Creatively calligraphed

Source: www.asianage.com