Nostalgic nightlife of Lahore

Amjad Naeem is a young practitioner from Lahore, who explores the night life of roadside cafes with thick impasto technique he has worked in urban life, exploring the relationship of city dwellers in natural outdoors surroundings.
The exhibition featuring the images based on the nightlife of Lahore and its surrounding rural areas landscapes was recently held at Art Scene galleries. The bright coloured cafes and canals with many types of foliage and trees casting their shadows in water depict an overwhelming energy in the pictures. Defined by shadows, the stately, nostalgic works in Amjad's show are somewhat cinematic perspective on the life style of the Lahorites.
His paintings reflect details in line and colour. Not many before him explored the nightlife of Lahore with such an intensity. His landscape paintings are full of life.
Based on the night mood with deep red, blue, green, yellow and ocher colours used in abundance along with the dark night background, the artist explores the time relation with non-physical realities. Using a broad range of colours and tones but tends to focus on the number of hues in each painting, from red hots to creamy pale yellows.
His concerns about the people and their way of spending time portrayed in the paintings speak more than words. His characterisation of people and the presentation of the existence of the living individuals in this world are amazing.
Amjad's brush splashes colours on the canvas and the landscape becomes a bizarre wasteland while the images he creates in this series are both magical and cold.
His past works portray various medium, including oil on canvas, Acrylic, water colour on paper but this time he chose oil as the medium of expression. He is a Lahore-based artist. He did his masters in Fine Arts from Punjab University, and he is currently teaching at Lahore Art Council. He has exhibited his works in numerous shows.
The current solo show is a skilful yet playful take on some of the conventions of Lahore city, full of life. The presence of images such as people and cafes against a backdrop of dark night time, luscious patterns, landscape, clouds all assembled into a coherent statement with a touch of contemporary sensibility.
He has knitted these formal elements of nature such as foliage, flowers, water and soil with night serenity depicting both nostalgia and confidence. His paintings have a strong socio-political context while the themes are based on the facts of life. Amjad's landscape paintings are well known for his impressions of Lahore, its environs and the particular way of life of the area coloured by the austere beauty of the landscape and its nomadic heritage. His paintings take their inspiration from a direct observation of nature. The pictorial richness of his canvases attracts people. The artist renders the images like Ravi scene, cafe environment, urban setting with green shades of trees and grass fields.