Tajuddin’s visages merge with subtle tint and line

Tajuddin Ahmed has established his name among contemporary Bangladeshi painters by dint of his original works. These works allow the genius to articulate his passionate soul. Recently, Tajuddin has been working on the diversity in human faces with a distinctive style and flair. Like others, the painter has become overcome with a deep stress during the pandemic. The pains of his fellow human beings are too much for him to bear and thus he has tried to scan the human faces of his surroundings and portrayed their agonies, and sufferings.

Generally, his focal points include mythological resemblance, animals, flora and fauna, vivacious culture of Old Dhaka, nostalgia, nature and human relationships. Born and bred in Dhaka, Tajuddin suddenly left the country for Toronto in 2008. He divides his time between Dhaka and Toronto. At present, the painter is in Dhaka and has brought a number of mixed-media based paintings along with him. The paintings focus on human faces with the mode of expressions--semi-abstract, abstract-expressionism and cubism.

He previously rendered human faces but the current faces are different in the sense that they are delicately painted, meticulously organised and done after deep observations. Some faces--of men, women and children--seem to be primeval, and unacquainted. The faces are not identical and each mien expresses a unique explanation and look.
The paintings have emphasis on varied tiny objects, graphical lines and forms, oval, semi-oval forms and varied symbolic patterns. The artist has also worked with several sizes of paper where he has meticulously placed the varied faces and forms. The artist feels face is the most significant part of the human body as it can express the language of the mind vividly. The facial expressions of the paintings are superb and impressive. His composition is sometimes styled with geometric shapes and lines.

A couple of faces by Tajuddin reveal his fondness towards folk art. He sometimes emblematically uses semi and full-fledged faces along with varied symbolic narratives, petite bushes and varied unfamiliar forms in different sizes. Tajuddin sometimes concentrates on healthy scribble lines, simple harmonic patterns and varied motifs. In creating so many faces in different perspectives, Tajuddin has again demonstrated his unrivalled creativity.

In his faces, Tajuddin has used acrylic, gesso, pen and pencil both individually and in combination which is called mixed-media. Besides, the artist has also adopted collage as a medium which lends him a fresh avenue. He engaged himself with collages during different periods of his career. He first did several collages in the mid-80s. He focused more deeply on the medium in the 1990s with a repertoire that exhibited technical excellence.

Tajuddin shuffles between mediums intermittently, each time returning to any particular one with renewed interest, deeper enquiry, and passion to bring a novel vision. During the last several months, Tajuddin has been experimenting with varied kinds of papers and materials in his collages. He has pasted fragments of paper where both thick and thin colours have been used simultaneously.

Many of his papers, which have been used in his collage, are in different sizes like rectangular, vertical, horizontal, oval and half-curved. The artist has brought many symbols into his collages. Space division in his compositions is dramatic; with big spaces kept flat while smaller areas have several tiny patterns. It is obvious that the artist has spent a considerable time to create the illusion of space.

Tajuddin portrays human visage and its mysterious facets through his personal notion, experience and thought process. The abstraction in his works comes naturally as he has adopted a unique language for his own ways of expressions. His collages are chronicles of his inner feelings and intense observation of his living space and life. His manipulation of forms, scattered drawings and controlled brush strokes create a language simultaneously natural and contrived.

Tajuddin's present works also feature mellow texture and soothing surfaces that are appealing. The paintings represent emotion and sentiment in a manner that seems to say that the artist wants to be universally understood.

Tajuddin Ahmed graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka (then Institute of Fine Arts). The neighbourhood of Rokonpur in the historic Laxmibazar in Old Dhaka imbibed in him the essence of his beloved city with its overpopulation and congested urban habitation. Thus, while growing up in arguably the most historical part of the capital, Tajuddin witnessed the changing city; daily chores of his community, their behaviour, culture, tradition, emotions, desperation, anguish and distress while allowing them to have a deep impact on him.

All these have fused painstakingly to build-up a set of captivating hallmarks which characterise his paintings. It has been detected that desire for new lines and forms are strikingly digging their way into his already epoch-making creative impulse. For the conclusion, this can surely be said that the painter will continue to innovate relentlessly as long as he breathes.
The writer is an art critic
 and cultural curator