Abed Chaudhury
Geneticist
Obscurity-revealation is the dialectic of visual art. While a frontal depiction of an object may clarify, educate, and inform, it is obscurity or mere suggestiveness that brings in an interest in art. Evolution has endowed our brain to like a visual game, similar to a jigsaw-puzzle, and to feel rewarded with a ‘aha’ type discovery when a obscured image is interpreted after a visual search and chase.
That is why suggestiveness of a tree shrouded in fog appears more interesting than the full frontal botanical depiction of a tree. A veiled woman’s face creates novel and interesting challenge for an artist, particularly a female artist. From an evolutionary neuro-aesthetic paradigm, a woman’s face is much more interesting than a random object of nature; in general for a fellow human, or in particular from the point of view of a male member of the species.
A woman’s face is a very important cue for a child, where the clarity-obscurity of the nourishing mothers face has implication for the survival of the child. For a young male shrouding of a female face is interesting in its suggestiveness, where visual cues might have been used as a device to attract, suggest, or even to deny. A face covered in a burqah where only the eyes are shown leaves the rest to interpretation; covered hair invokes questions about its length, texture etc. A selectively obscured face is clearly an enigma, something art loves and celebrates.
Preema’s painting plays on this aspect. To her veiling is clearly an artistic device to explore in an elemental visual way but also perhaps in a socio-political way. From purely neural evolutionary analyses it brings into play ancient questions of human gender interactions and how the reciprocal visual exposure and obscurity of male and females have remained deeply ingrained our brains and now informs not only our sociology and art but also deep imageries of our art.
Preema is passionate about women and painting. She celebrates such passion through series pf paintings called ‘Staring Women’ where women’s eyes are revealed but the majority of the face is obscured. In one of her painting called ‘Flower and Veil’ the visual essence is depicted cubist-like as interplay of visual elements. The gestalt of veiling is celebrated in so many other painting in novel and innovative ways. To me what is interesting is that a fundamental dualism of art itself, e.g., revelation-obscurity, or veiling, is deconstructed perhaps as a deliberate feminist device bringing in very interesting questions-at-the interface of gender interaction and art.
Faced with such artistic celebration of the veiling of a woman’s face, what would people say about Preema’s art?