Qamar Saddiqui

In his artist statement, Siddiqui states that his use of colors is highly symbolic, with white representing purity and red signifying the material world. In that context, the white, cocooned figures suggest almost a fetal quality and in the few paintings where the stylized faces are visible, their expressions appear serene. In this particular series, the color red makes its way into the canvas in the form of red high heels in one painting and a checkerboard pattern slowly making its way up the body in others.

He had painted traditional pots in realistic style with vibrant colors including Hala blue. His current fifteen large scale exhibits speak for his skill and imagination and a sensibility for self-editing. There is nothing superfluous on his canvases. Each form serves as a symbol of some idea.

So far as Siddiqui’s concept, which is evident from the title of his exhibition, is concerned, he proceeds with a hypothesis. The viewer assumes that perhaps the painter has discovered reality of life at a higher scale. Although he is spiritually inspired and no creative activity is devoid of spiritual element, in his paintings he raises issues rising from the ground level. These are preaching’s from an ethical code derived from a religious source. At the basic level every hypothesis splits up into two directions; one is negative and the other is positive. Adaptation of any one of the two results accordingly. By negative he means secularism in a commonly understood way and by positive he means the path of a believer. His canvases mirror sophisticated and mature knowledge of an art structure presupposing the vastly complex processes: conceptual, perceptual, symbolic and the rest, involved in the understanding of any structure.  Qamar Siddiqui endows his paintings with personally-embodied experience of meaning. His experience is based on his feelings which are inspired from his religious belief. So far, we have spoken about what lies beneath the paints on his canvases. The bare eye sees chess boards, red, blue and black, yellow and white paints, keys feathers and human profiles, forms suggesting cuddled up human bodies, obviously drawn hands and feet and sandals. With all these elements, Siddiqui creates a drama of aesthetics. Skillfully he forms human structures with delicately painted white feathers in grey tones and places these forms close to red and black and black and white chess boards. Black and white chess boards are symbols of life we are living on earth; red and black chess boards refer to a life full of lust. Delicate feathers which construct the structures of heavily formed human bodies are symbols of purity. Against grey tones he makes a bowl and arises from it a recast of the bowl in Hala blue as a symbol of light, the light that renders our actions the value of goodness. As nothing is superfluous on his canvases, the key on top of the blue image is a tool to open the closed doors of what lies beyond the physical. In this painting the imagination travels from the physical to the metaphysical. This action takes place under the ‘positive’ approach of the artist. This same painting can be interpreted as opening doors of the unknown with the key of knowledge.
Siddiqui’s paintings hold a place in the international market.