t is impossible to name the women, or count the pigeons and doves, that appear in the canvases of Jamil Naqsh. Varying in composition, colour, posture, position and scale, they occupy the rectangular and square surfaces the painter continued to produce until his final days in 2019. Born in undivided India, Naqsh spent much of his life in his Karachi studio, an origin that was never a location in the conventional sense, but merely a step, a stopover on the way to another hemisphere. His art could rightfully be called his true home. Thus, his posthumous solo exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery, London (July 10-31), hardly seems out of place, imported or exotic.

This is true mainly for two reasons: his subject matter and his technique. A naked woman belongs everywhere, and therefore nowhere. Likewise, pigeons and doves fly across countries and continents, resisting attachment to any one locality. Both, whether newly born, grown old or marked by bodily difference, possess an ideal image embedded in the viewer’s mind, where the imagination supersedes, even ignores, the information received through the eyes. Jamil Naqsh’s women and birds correspond to that universal image.

Then there is Naqsh’s technique. The artist is known for his sensitive patchwork of paint, echoing pardakht, a traditional Indo-Persian technique, similar to pointillism, in which small dots of colour build an image, adding texture and depth. It was a method he learnt from Ustad Haji Muhammad Sharif during the brief period he was enrolled at the National College of Arts, connecting him both to an age-old South Asian aesthetic and to the sensibility associated with Georges Seurat’s explorations of the mechanics of perception.

Naqsh’s nature also seeps into the way he applied paint. Carefully chosen, freely layered and delicately multiplied, these superbly constructed compositions convey the sensation of a tangible female figure and a living bird moving within or escaping from the canvas. It is a bond between two protagonists that Jamil Naqsh returned to repeatedly, every time with a different frame of mind, a different set of eyes and a different feeling.

For many spectators, armed only with cursory glances and pre-fabricated assumptions, the art of Jamil Naqsh may appear to be unending repetition. But the current exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery, comprising his earlier paintings – mostly from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, with three from the 1990s – defies that description. Viewed retrospectively, these early images of nude figures and birds possess an identity distinct from his later work. Compared with the earlier canvases, in which human figures and birds appear with a subdued presence, the later paintings present similar subjects while preserving their commanding reality. It is a reality that did not preoccupy Naqsh alone; it has haunted other image-makers too; not a fixed or settled truth, but an invitation to inquiry.

A question that may confront the viewer is what Jamil Naqsh looked for over the course of his decades-long career. Was it a reality we can name, conveniently identify and readily recognise? Or was it that which we reject, find sexually explicit, dismiss as gender-biased or something else altogether, beyond the reach of our already formed associations, anticipations and expectations of a work of art? What Naqsh sought to explore was, in fact, the essence latent within an artist’s aesthetic. He did not look lovingly at the naked body, nor was he fascinated by pigeons and doves fluttering their wings or shifting their beaks. Rather, he remained captivated by the impetus they gave him to express what moved him most: the love and labour of craft. The practice of a painter able to see beyond what remains on the surface, blinding all that is visible in order to reach a membrane that can only be described as sensuous, tactile and tempting.

It is a reality that did not preoccupy Naqsh alone; it has haunted other image-makers too. Not a fixed or settled truth, but an invitation to inquiry.

This quality, which shifts Naqsh’s earlier paintings towards abstraction – away from everyday encounter and towards the experience of the sublime – is achieved by pushing the subject into the background and bringing the web of paint to the foreground. Not through a direct method, but by a discreet gesture that invites the viewer to enter a field of recognisable forms: a woman, a pigeon, a dove, later joined by a horse or a page of text.

The combination of a woman and a bird is not unique. Jamil Naqsh inherited this motif from a variety of sources, including Mughal miniatures, the paintings of Shakir Ali and the Tutinama. In Mughal painting, a woman holding a bird embodies beauty, grace and delicacy, suggesting an affinity between the two. In Shakir Ali’s work, the bird beside a nude figure signifies the freedom of the human soul, particularly in the aftermath of World War II, a period that shattered ideals of liberty, peaceful coexistence and harmonious progress. In its place emerged alienation as the individual’s fate, recalling Sartre’s No Exit. Birds became the only hope of transcending manmade boundaries and enjoying an unmatched freedom – a recurring theme in the work of Rainer Maria Rilke, whose poetry deeply inspired Shakir Ali.

Tutinama (Tales of a Parrot) is a 14th-Century collection of 52 stories in Persian, illustrated in numerous manuscripts, “especially a version containing 250 miniature paintings commissioned by the Mughal emperor Akbar.” The stories are narrated by a parrot – appropriately, given the bird’s reputed gift for speech – to its mistress night after night, persuading her “not to commit any adulterous act with any lover in the absence of her husband.”

In all these accounts, the bird becomes the bearer of something beyond physical confinement or mental restraint, while retaining its captivating presence. In the historic tale, it is the sole companion of an abandoned woman and, like the poet, painter or any other creative individual, opens up an unknown realm: a world that symbolises redemption, space and solace. This quality is also evident in Jamil Naqsh’s paintings. Looking at their delicate surfaces, one recalls a woman’s gentle touch, a mother’s love, a partner’s compassion and a friend’s embrace, all suggesting tenderness and selflessness in contrast to the coarser interactions often associated with men.

The delicacy associated with women is also apparent in their postures. Jamil Naqsh’s paintings depict women reclining beside doves, carrying pigeons in their palms, supporting birds with outstretched arms, holding them close to their faces as if in conversation, raising a flock with both hands, or lying with a pigeon behind the figure’s torso. These women are not made of flesh and bone, but of lines, scratches, textures, tones, layers and daubs of paint. They are constructed from the only material a painter possesses to build distinct and deceptive worlds – a simple fact we too often forget.

The writer is a visual artist, an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be contacted at [email protected].