Imagine a silent abstractionist from the state of Madhya Pradesh, shaped in the shadows of Jagdish Swaminathan and SH Raza, living in Bhopal and waiting in the wings for someone to understand his brilliance and put him on the global map of contemporary practices.

This is former Director, Bihar Museum, Patna Yusuf, who has for 50 years contemplated the paintings of an ever-evolving landscape of the inner eye and created works that mirror the aesthetics felt amid the immense shadows of ascending joys/difficulties of life and its many crests and troughs.

In a meticulous meandering of threads as well as lines, here was an odyssey that ran into depths and intensities unknown.

At Sunder Nagar in Delhi, in the maze of a gorgeous home, is collector and art aficionado Shantanu Sharma’s maze of rooms that brought in Sanya Malik’s Black Cube to create a sterling display of Yusuf’s works that meandered between playfully poetic, pensive parallel lines, multiple threads and the beauty of fragments and planes.

Threads in minimalism

At heart, Yusuf is a precisionist who has created his own odyssey of abstraction that is cool, detached and powerfully potent. Divided into the rooms, each series defines structure in the charisma of compositional character. Form for Yusuf is something that emerges through proximity and response, with each composition maintaining its own awareness and identity of the synergy it belongs to, as in the threads that distil in its own gravitas of Yusuf’s threaded beauties are as much about fragility as they are about visual dynamics in tone and tenor.

Graded symphony of lines

Amongst his many works are those that evoke mathematical precision in the lithe lines of parallel streams that invite reflection.

In the lingua franca of minimalism, here is a set of works that have the foundations of the realm of lines but are seen to be the backdrop of a series of colour phenomena enacted in fragmented planes that become the benchmark of abstract domains.

Yusuf shares the words of his Guru Jagdish Swaminathan.

“ His line partakes both of the particle and wave quality of light. It creates continuous contours while even proceeding as discreet quanta.”

What emanates is the enchantment of the visual effect which depends on Yusuf’s silent yet shared intelligence of the inner eye, where cohesion is maintained within his own contemplative islands of meditation.

Rhapsody in Blue

The rooms reflect  Yusuf’s perceptive principle of linear strategies on an architectural scale. The room with a series of blue works echoes Rhapsody in Blue. By flattening his own intuitive layout, his canvases place different intensities of islands of fragments and lines in direct relation.

Movement for Yusuf across the canvas is like a whispered continuum, allowing visitors to construct their own paths in their minds. The beauty of these blues is that spatial experience is shaped through connections rather than thresholds.

Crimson Tide

Then comes the room with canvases that echo the crimson tide in spurts. It’s almost as if we are witnesses to his resonance of murmurations. Within his fragments and lines of planar poetics, we sense the exploratory and experimental over years of a contemplated inner sanctum.

There is an immeasurable manifestation of his own personality, in which we see the attachment of a primordial value to the discovery of a novel artistic procedure.

Lines in space

One has to recall the words of yet another close friend and Guru who loved Yusuf, Sayed Haider Raza, who said: Yusuf reveals his essential preoccupation: lines in space. He starts with the simplest strategies of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines to build up pictorial situations of great complexity and great sophistication.”

In this solo show of magic and caprice, an age-old narrative plays out in varied gradations of colour and contour. Pure/amorphous forms and colour result in a variety of methods and techniques and the viewer can walk away knowing that abstraction is more than colour; it is more than mere strokes it is built on the great diversity in personality resulting in the configuration of interrelated, asymmetrical shapes embedded in an expanse of matte as well as satin shades.

Yusuf’s ability to play with depth is implied by the rippling blacks and advancing blues, reds and whites; however, they are held in check by producing an overall flatness that is held by principles of energy. Shapes in abstraction for Yusuf have always been about highlighting and complementing the skeletal framework. And between the lithe lines in space lives the gravitas of time past and present.

Images: Black Cube 

END OF ARTICLE