Artistic concerns of Riaz Samadhan

He is a sensitive artist who highlights his concerns over the culture of excesses. Riaz Samadhan moans the fact that blatant profit seeking witnessed in the marketplace is influencing the mindset commodity hungry customers and reengineering their emotional behavior beyond recognition.

This causes a state of a partial psychological amnesia, as he elaborates, “Man has lost his identity. Presentation and panache are now more vital than the soul. Presentation is the mantra - project something you’re not, be somebody that is not the true ‘you’. The market has entered the households. We state our worth, flaunting price tags, even in our personal lives. Even luxury has turned into a need – one that breeds miseries.

For example, his ‘House with a window display’ (oil on canvas; 2009) portrays a point when the market invades a household. Behavioral patterns of these two separate worlds distinctively differ. Depicted juxtaposition of elements from two separate worlds, an expensive dress and a humble clothesline represents peripheral visual chaos of the new market society, where house windows are on display.

Another work that amplifies his fears, ‘Living in pieces, looking for peace’ (oil on canvas; 2008) depicts the incapacity of today’s man to see his self inventive fragmented existence. The depiction of hands in different gestures suggests disharmony and chaos within. Spilt face points to a myopic celebration at the cost of his existence. Camouflaged social ladder emerges as the prominent catalyst of the modern times, where incessant desire fuels up every move to secure a higher place on it.

“Saving money is common sense, losing the innocence and purity of life is not. Commercializing of emotion is something we support covertly, yet whole heartedly, because it provides us masks, gives us the illusion of at least being somebody, behind whom we can hide ourselves. Now what is our true face is a matter of investigation. It is almost impossible to make out that deep down our own emotional patterns are corrupted by marketing,” Riaz Samadhan quips.