The bold, explosive work of Irfan Haider Mirza has placed him on the art scene in Pakistan as a young painter to watch out for. A former student of the Karachi School of Art, since his graduation in 2007, Irfan has participated in several exhibitions, his work capturing audience attention for the energetic movement that appears to communicate the painter’s pulse of life. Using as media, water colour, pen and oil wash, the artist’s method of experimentation with colour, line, space and form bear traces of history in the reference to lines that though ragged, echo textural Kufic symbols. Linking the past with the present, the overall suggestion of a gridded substructure in the work creates depth and balances the diversity of the painted symbols of a disturbed world. Dominating the composition one discovers fragmented faces and fear filled eyes. The artist’s mixed media artworks describe a variety of art disciplines and media on surfaces of varying scales defined by a passionate identification with his generation.

In compositions densely layered with orange and ochre shades, there are patterns of floating shapes, limbs, figures, strokes that appear to have no control upon the direction they are headed for and thus drift helplessly. The work has a vitality that appears to create movement if you allow your eye to travel freely. The interplay of patterns in the work is complicated by areas of darker brushstrokes, hues that contain and border the imagery. Here is an artist who freely experiments with diverse media generating excitement in the process. He is a painter who expresses not only personal contentions and concerns, but also a sense of the artist’s opinion of the values and norms of a changing environment. The issues that concern young contemporary artists in present times relate to their socio-political environments, expressed in a vocabulary that inducts popular culture, the idiom of the urban experience. Increasingly one finds addressed the sense of displacement nurtured in societies where harmonious co-existence is a relic of the past. Artists are those who document their times transcending creeds and geographical barriers with shared aesthetics.

While ostensibly addressing with ironic comment the universal violence that threatens the world as we know it today, Irfan Haider Mirza may also use the anomalies of his work to express the private fears and emotions in the personal world of the young and sensitive individual. He is at present beginning a career in art that will take him far. He has the focus and obsession with the aspects of art to be explored that determine his chosen vocation. In the swirling cacophony of the painted shapes packed with diversion and intrigue one senses the painter’s integral strength and enjoyment; a conviction that the universe and cycle of life will prevail.

One would dearly enjoy a glimpse into the future, to view Irfan’s work after a decade when with maturity he will have solved aesthetic problems and created many more. There is no one way to look at and interpret art. Each interpretation has its own value leading the way to a better understanding that encourages a reflection of the artist’s views from an audience who wishes to extend and develop their own sense of what makes for an informed response. It has been said that art does not change the world, but it does change the way in which we view the world.