Fisher woman of my Mohenjo

the largest cities of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization.
Forgotten for more than 3500 years, but extensively excavated
since the mid-1920s, the site offers proof that Pakistan was at a
very remote epoch in possession of a complex urban culture.
The paintings do not, however, insist on a single set of cultural
references. There is instead a whole network of other images,
which often seen to appear then disappear again as you look.
There are references to cultures even more remote from us
than that of Mohenjo-daro – for example to Palaeolithic
graffiti. There are references to European classical antiquity,
and to the neo-classicism of J.-L David and Ingres. Perhaps
also to the classical phases of Renoir and Picasso.
There are still-lifes featuring fish, and at least one
painting whose main image is a zebu, filling the whole of
the picture-space. Zebu cattle exist today, sometimes in
miniature form, but they are thought to be derived from
the much larger pre-historic Indian aurochs, which
became extinct during the time of the Indus Valley
civilization, and possibly because of its rise.
The more closely you examine these compositions,
the richer the range of cultural reference becomes.
In this sense Jamil Naqsh’s new paintings are extremely
modern, in a very comprehensive sense of that much-abused
and much misused adjective. They remind us that, wherever
we actually come from, we live in an echo chamber, and that
the resonances become increasingly complex and intense as
we moved towards whatever the future may have in store for
us. A citizen of the world, content to remain enclosed in his
studio, Jamil Naqsh may be more keenly aware of that than
we are ourselves. His paintings bring us face to face with this
realisation, but slyly, cunningly hold just a little bit back. We
have to do more than just look – we have to become part of
the work, through the act of looking.