Muzzumil Ruheel learned calligraphy in Urdu, Persian and Arabic as a schoolboy, and was trained to give each letter its correct proportion. He also noticed that viewers tended to look at calligraphy rather than read it. His calligraphic abstraction starts from that gap: what remains of a script when the looking has replaced the reading.
Looking at the work
The paintings are built from writing. Words are repeated until they dissolve into fields of colour, legible as abstraction from a distance and unreadable up close. Letters fragment, overlap or disappear, and repetition becomes the structure of the picture. The grounds are red, amber, deep blue or near-black, often divided across the middle like a horizon. The longer you look, the less the question is what the writing says and the more it is what it does to the act of reading.
Repetition and mashq
The press release for his 2016 exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery compared his method of repeated research and rewriting to mashq, the traditional exercise of rehearsing letters until they are perfected. From a distance, it adds, such works look like tangled grey masses.
Murtaza notes that in traditional mashq the letters connect within a word and show their variants in context. Ruheel’s disconnected, enlarged marks lack that logic. She reads this as fragmentation, a sign of social upheaval, and also as an assertion of the artist’s authority over a new script (see The Karachi Collective).
Sacred in appearance
Ruheel’s earlier work used the look of sacred script on ordinary speech. In a 2014 review in Newsline, the calligraphy resembles Quranic verses but carries everyday stories, set beside old photographs of people. The works question the reverence given to a language and the habit of obeying text without reading it. The Thuluth-style pieces of 2008 and 2009 did something similar and, Murtaza notes, drew controversy.
Reduction
By the time of Misunderstandings (Canvas Gallery, 2019), the dense cursive compositions had given way to marks, strokes and fragments. Salwat Ali describes works in which two parallel lines suggest being together yet apart, and in which the middle of the word takseem (division) is erased, splitting it in two. Abstraction here is not a departure from calligraphy. It is calligraphy reduced to its structure.
Abstraction with a purpose
Ruheel does not treat abstraction as the goal. Each work begins with a question, an observation or a piece of research, and the idea chooses its form. The subjects are language, memory, perception, identity, silence and how meaning is made when something is only partly legible.
In context
The history is international. The Arab Hurufiyya artists treated letters as signs emptied of fixed meaning, as the writer in Dawn notes, citing the art historian Christiane Treichl. The Saqqakhaneh painters of Iran, Sadequain and Zahoor ul Akhlaq in Pakistan, Mark Tobey and Cy Twombly each turned writing into painting in their own terms. Ruheel’s work can be read within that field without following any one school. For the tradition he started from, the Metropolitan Museum’s essay on calligraphy in Islamic art is a good introduction. See also Text-Based Art, Text-Based Sculpture and Augmented Reality.
Selected works
Enquiries
For enquiries about works, exhibitions and press, write to muzzumilstudio@gmail.com. Contact page