“Language is one of the biggest inventions of humanity. Writing has been a method of documenting human ideas, information, creative expressions and secrets from private to public usage. In my work, I translate text, convert sounds into pictoral form, and free them from their original purpose of readability and communication.” – M. Talpur

Mohammad Ali Talpur is recognised as the leading contemporary minimalist artist in Pakistan. Talpur was an alumni of National College of Arts in Lahore where he now teaches. It was here as part of his studies that he began his visual exploration into the process of drawing, caligraphy and the construction of line as well as the traditional craft of miniature painting.

His practice combines calligraphy and language with the western minimalist example of virtuosos such as Sol LeWitt. Talpur champions a return to the craft of drawing and through it explores the art of writing calligraphy. This became almost a meditative obsession for the artist which immersed Talpur into a process of mapping the very medium of drawing. Working in marker, oil and acrylic on canvas as well as ink and technical pen on paper, his work is a perpetual investigation into the mechanics of the drawn line. Talpur’s pictures at first appear as monochromatic optical abstract images. Beneath this meticulous technical prowess and sinuating elegance of line, latent layers of meaning slowly unravel.

Talpur’s recent works which he refers to as his Optical Calligraphies are intentionally discombobulating, reducing calligraphy to a binary monochromatic grid. They have become purely pictorial and abandon specific meaning. Through extricating line on an almost elemental level his pictures are paradoxically intelligible and illegible. The organic technique in simulating his mechanical lines is perhaps a sardonic inversion of artificial intelligence and atomisation as Talpur’s works explore calligraphy for a contemporary world.