Taseer Art Gallery

This recent series is a particularly rich example of Ayaz  Jokhio’ s trademark minimalist explorations of the many edges of reality through a symbolic device.  

 The silhouettes within which Jokhio’s non-narrative, slow motion drawings arbitrarily unfold have notable significance. They resulted from his child’s doodles. Within the framework of these childlike doodles are contained snapshots of daily living - an artist’s attempt to explore the experience of everyday stimuli with the added potency of a child’s fresh raw vision.

Unlike many artists who focus on such investigations, however, he avoids nostalgia, seeking instead to make the image emotionally inert by isolating it from its original context. This contributes to the viewer's sense of indeterminacy. Some of the images present a startling contrast between the happy childish depictions of umbrellas and rainclouds with a remarkably chilling monologue about flood victims and death. You can also sense the latent anxiety the artist has about his child navigating his way within a society that is not terribly sympathetic.

While the scale and subject matter of Jokhios art has varied widely, what remains constant is an engagement with symbolic devices to present an amplified version of reality. The exhibition is an outstanding example of the diverse subjects that have occupied his interest for a decade featuring works that address notions of time, memory and displacement, and the relationship between artistic vision and the material world.