Sami Qureshi

REVIEW ON THE BOOK ‘HISTORY ON TRIAL’ PUBLISHED IN DAWN ON 9th AUGUST, 2009



It may sound and read a little pedestrian, but Sami Qureshi is a fine artist. You will find this claim hard to dispute once you see his oil-on-canvas work. But what you can see through his artistic pursuits is a man who is well-informed and scholarly, something that Pakistani artists belonging to the younger generation need to work on or be like, because most of them, borrowing an Oscar Wilde phrase, talk a lot and say less.

Sami Qureshi, like all artists, doesn’t seem to be short of ideas. He has come up with a book, History on trial, published by the RLCA — a publishing division of the Rashid Latif Cricket Academy — describing some of his paintings (along with pictures of the chosen pieces) that he’s made in the span of a couple of decades. It’s a worthy read, and the pictures, despite being a bit low-res, are good to look at.

Paging through the book makes it abundantly clear that Sami Qureshi’s subject — no matter what ism (surrealism, cubism, impressionism etc) he tries to dabble in — is man. He is perturbed by the diabolical side to man and, at the same time, is excited by what he’s capable of achieving. Seeking help from the history of mankind, Sami, by virtue of his work, tries to unravel the enigma that contemporary man has become. Even when his subject doesn’t come across as an enigma, his deeds prove to be enough material for the artist to splash colours onto the canvas.

If on the one hand Sami Qureshi appears to be battling with the concepts that sprung up, in a trice after the horrendous events of 9/11, on the other hand he touches upon the issue of time (or timelessness) that has been the subject of men of letters and artists from time immemorial.

The artist’s quest doesn’t stop here. You can find the plight of the desert people and the predicament of a blacksmith in a small village in Tharparkar also making Sami Qureshi think and create art, not to mention issues like gender bias and migration. The greatest Urdu poet Ghalib (there are paintings based on his couplets) also fascinates him, so does a lonely tree and a river in Bangladesh. So it’s an array of themes but all leading to one topic: man. Or so this scribe thinks.

A good thing that Sami Qureshi has done is that he hasn’t made his explanation for his art pieces uninteresting by giving away all that he may have thought at the time of their creation. Instead, he has tried to give a socio-political background to each. This makes the fun of the reading intact.

— Peerzada Salman