Prologue/Epilogue

Needless to say, in their confessedly fevered borrowings from, amongst other times, the bronze age, our artists have found less bizarre methods to get up close and personal with their god of creativity:  the struggles, acts of bravado and devotion that, in fin, have aggregated to bring forth a great deal of forceful visuality.  Most of the canvases, laden with narratives, heavily layered, with broken or solid color being the foundation, are worked over with remarkable virtuosity of detail and invention, an unreserved appropriation of materials, and above all, an infallible sense of graphic representation. All these demonstrate an uncanny absorption of aesthetic principles in all that they study for inspiration. One aspect of their work secretly builds on precisely a less-noticed characteristic of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s oeuvre – a closer look shows us that Basquiat’s ideograms were not completely placed at random – he had mastered the art of working to an invisible grid. And, it seems, so have Ujala Khan and M4HK.

This oeuvre generates sensations produced in series of expanding and contracting patterns, and leitmotifs on grand scales. The major force operational in this exuberant way of manufacture, perhaps, is ritual repetition. Conceptually, for instance, both ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and Tibetan chakra wheels respectively were and are intended to endlessly repeat incantations, a process, in this case, by means of which the present artists have accomplished what amounts to a speech act, a trance-formation, as it were, in which they allude to that which was, to that which is now, these temporalities bracketing the wide and scintillating continuum. Despite the collapse of the older systems, we remain beings that define our humanity via a diverse symbolic system.


Paul-Mehdi Rizvi is an interdisciplinary artist and art critic based in Karachi, Pakistan