The Haunting Beauty of Disappearance
Hira Shahid
A review of Ahsan Memon’s solo, Still, Again, on display at White Wall Gallery till 24 October.
There are paintings that you merely look at, and then there are those that make you want to stay a little longer. Standing inside White Wall Gallery, surrounded by Ahsan Memon’s paintings in Still, Again, I found myself drawn to a peculiar quietness. It was neither entirely peaceful nor unsettling enough to become uncomfortable, but existed somewhere between the two. The paintings seemed to hold something just beyond reach, their images emerging from and dissolving into the canvases as though caught between appearing and disappearing.
Memon’s new body of work considers decay and the gradual disappearance of the image, drawing a parallel between the life cycle of an artwork and the impermanence of human existence. Rather than approaching this idea through a fixed narrative, he allows it to unfold through the paintings themselves. Their blurred imagery and hazy luminosity evoke something half-remembered, as though the viewer has arrived at a moment when an image is already beginning to recede. There is a sense of transience throughout the exhibition, but also an insistence on looking closely at what remains.
Blue establishes the emotional language of these works. It lends the paintings a remarkable serenity, drawing the eye into their depths, yet beneath this calmness lies something faintly eerie. The colour seems to absorb light, while an unusual glow emanates from the painted surfaces. This interplay produces an atmosphere that is difficult to name: the paintings are soothing, yet their stillness carries a quiet unease. They seem to inhabit a space in which beauty and loss are not opposing forces, rather they exist alongside one another.
This tension becomes particularly affecting in Memon’s treatment of the human body. In ‘Hush’, I remember standing before his enormous painted hands, struck by the balance between their physical presence and their apparent dissolution. Their forms seemed to merge with the canvas, their edges softening until the distinction between the body and its surroundings became uncertain. Yet the details remained remarkably legible. The creases of the skin, the delicate lines and folds and the subtle variations across the surface were all rendered with extraordinary sensitivity.
It is this precision within the blurring that makes ‘Hush’ so compelling. Memon allows the image to recede without sacrificing its specificity. The hands appear to be fading, yet they retain their physical character, caught between visibility and disappearance. There is something deeply evocative about choosing the hand as a subject: an instrument of touch, intimacy and communication, it carries traces of our encounters with others. In this painting, the body becomes a reminder of how something can remain recognisable, even as it slips beyond our grasp.
In ‘Wordless’, this sense of withheld communication becomes even more pronounced. The title suggests a silence that is not necessarily empty, but filled with feelings that resist articulation. The painting’s softened forms and luminous haze make the absence of speech feel almost tangible, as though the figure is holding something back or has been left beyond the reach of language. By contrast, ‘Say Something?’ introduces an intriguing counterpoint, evoking the desire for communication alongside the difficulty of making oneself understood. These paintings seem particularly fitting within an exhibition where gestures often speak more insistently than faces. They encourage us to consider not only what the figures reveal, but also what remains withheld. Silence becomes an active presence, shaped by the tension between expression and withdrawal.
The soft halos surrounding the forms intensify this impression. Rather than separating the subject from its background, Memon lets the two bleed into one another, giving the figures an almost spectral quality. The resulting glow does not simply make the images appear otherworldly; it creates a distance between the viewer and the subject, as though the paintings are offering glimpses of something that cannot be fully recovered.
Memon’s technical command is undeniable. Maintaining such a delicate balance between dissolution and detail requires considerable control, and the paintings reward sustained attention. What initially appears indistinct gradually reveals its intricacies, encouraging the viewer to look beyond the first impression. In ‘Surrender', the title itself suggests a relinquishing of control, resonating with the painting’s resistance to being held in a single, stable image. Its softened forms seem to yield to the surrounding blue, even as carefully rendered details continue to assert themselves. ‘Again and Again’, meanwhile, evokes the repetitive act of looking, of returning to an image in the hope that another encounter might reveal what the previous one could not. At times, however, the recurring blue palette and luminous blurring bring the works into such close visual conversation that their individual differences become less pronounced. The paintings are most powerful when the softness of the image meets the precision of its details, allowing the tension between disappearance and recognition to emerge through the act of looking itself.
The title Still, Again holds this contradiction beautifully. ‘Still’ suggests suspension, while ‘again’ implies return. Together, the words evoke the possibility of encountering something more than once, even when it can never be recovered in quite the same form. Perhaps this is how memory works: images fade, details become uncertain, and yet certain impressions return with unexpected clarity. The catalogue’s reference to the aarti diya, connected to Memon’s childhood and memories of Hindu-Muslim coexistence, adds another dimension to this idea. What remains is not a complete record of the past, but a trace of the people, places and encounters that have shaped it.
Memon’s paintings beautifully invite us to consider impermanence without turning it into spectacle or sentiment. They ask us to pay attention to what we have in the moment, whatever we are left with, however briefly, before it changes beyond recognition. Sometimes, the most affecting images are those that seem to be leaving us even as we stand before them.
All artwork is by Ahsan Memon and via the gallery catalogue.
Hira Shahid is a writer and visual artist based in Karachi, currently pursuing an MPhil in Visual Arts at the National College of Arts, Lahore. With a background in visual arts and photography, she writes about contemporary art and exhibitions. Her writing has been published in Dawn and ArtNow Pakistan.
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