Beyond the Beautiful

The pictorial representation of a scattred ecosystem combined with agonising accounts of people's lives in various places at varied times are what forms the crux of Zakkir Hussain's work

- Zakkir Hussain's

A recent group exhibition of seven contemporary artists, Measures of Lucidity, curated by artist-curator Jitha Karthikeyan at Gallerie Splash, Gurugram, left us rethinking the chaos and to seek pellucidity in our lives, lest we lose ‘what is’ amidst the cacophony of it all. The show, which was an attempt to deconstruct the complexities that plague our existence, left us truly wondering: “Are we heading towards a tangled reality? Are we forgetting the plain and the simple that make up our life?” Though the show featured works of some of the finest contemporary artists in our country – Arpita Singh, George Martin P J, K M Madhusudhanan, Muktinath Mondal, Parvathi Nayar, T V Santhosh and Zakkir Hussain, it’s the Ernakulam-based Hussain, who needs special mention here. His artwork that seems visually charged and jolly bestowed with a sense of exuberance and dynamism from a distance, at a closer look, it’s a mixture of chaos and colour, and tries to go beyond the beautiful to the horror veiled by the fascinating presence of beauty. His works travel through forgotten memories and can be read as amputations of the history of visual representations. “The pictorial representation of a scattred ecosystem combined with agonising accounts of people’s lives in various places at varied times are what forms the crux of my works, thereby also creating a poetic space,” explains the mixed media artist.