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Sadequain the Holy Sinner

© Asma A. Ahmad - Visage Magazine

The Mohatta Palace Museum has a magnificent display of Sadequain's work spanning his work from 1957 to 1987, a short period of only three decades where he begins with Picasso & artists of the modern art genre providing the framework for his paintings. The 1958 painting of 'The Bathers' bears testimony of Picasso's influence on his earlier work, as do a number of other works. But that is not to say that it limited his personal style. He evolved a strongly individualistic style of painting with a strong dark outline and a distinct visual vocabulary in which the cactus played a central role.

Sadequain's exhibition at the Mohatta Palace Museum is organised such that his evolution and development of personal style is displayed year by year from 1957 to 1987. A separate room is dedicated to each year or significant period of Sadequain's art. Sadequain's signature style with which he came to be associated evolved over a period of time; his gangly, angular figures, the use of the dark thick outline and his dramatic calligraphy.

The angular, lean figures evolved over a span in which the cactus was a reoccurring motif. He developed this imagery of the cactus while recovering from an illness at the Gadani beach. Here in the rocky dry soil braving the inland wind was the rugged cacti. "cactus grows in the most hostile climates, yet it grows majestically. To me it symbolises the triumph of life over it's environment. Once I used to identify it with my own self. Then I started identifying it with the whole community.." Sadequain's cacti became people and his people became cacti.

The effect the cacti had on his figurative work is evident, with the figures becoming more linear, elongated and the human limbs taking on an organic feel of the cacti. The cactus in Sadequain's paintings has a dual significance. It symbolises, on the one hand, man's struggle against natural hazards (like the cacti's against the harsh elements of the desert) and his ultimate victory over them. On the other hand, it's ugly and thorny form is exaggerated to represent moral decadence.

An example of this imagery can be seen in the painting Hope I. Here the artist shows a headless man lying on the ground with one upraised hand holding the head on which a crow has made a nest with eggs in it. Cobwebs abound in between the limbs of this man. A thinking, sensitive person, Sadequain desired to comment on society and the human condition. His tortured male figures are often depicted overgrown with cacti, trapped in lethal webs. Imagistically this web, a sign of decadence, is interpreted in a variety of ways; a cactus thicket, as a cobweb and as a nest of squirming snakes. Exaggerated hands and grotesquely long fingers -are familiar presences in his drawings. So this figure of a man trapped in decadence as the cobwebs represent, with a crow's nest on the decapitated head which represents corruption. Yet hope lives amidst the decadence and corruption as represented by the rising sun behind the head in the painting. This painting seems to embody a vibrant pain, the cobwebs amidst the limbs seems alive & the crow seems well settled on the decapitated head while the face seems to convey only pain and resignation.

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