T he exhibition entitled, Within and Without, which folded up recently had all the trappings of an overwhelming experience. The works of four highly talented artists trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore, hung on the walls of the Full Circle Gallery in Karachi for almost a month in pert and pouting ecstasy -just waiting to be seen.

What all four artists had in common was they made the visitor stand and stare. There was no common motif` be-tween the different works that would propel it towards a uniform theme. No two styles or subjects were alike. What I did notice, however, was that all compositions carried titles, some prosaic, some descriptive and one delightfully risqué.

I would like to start with Annem Zaidi, because she appears to have broken the glass on emergency ideas. In her work I detected a certain desire to steer away from the accepted norm and an excessive fondness for contrast black and white, luminosity and darkness, night and day a soit of perpetual pictorial antithesis.

The females in her compositions live in a world of shadows. They are faceless and anonymous and their forms are etched in outline. This is because her paintings are not really about women. They are about the minutiae of` draperyaprons and fabric, the finery associated with the female of the species, pictures which provided an inordinate fascination for men in the Victorian and Edwardian era. These delightful little cameos tell their own story in their own words.

I found certain warmth and passion in the portraits of Dua Abbas. In a sense her approach to art has been somewhat Ptolemaic, especially when centring on the importance of woman in the social fabric. Each of her five pas-tels is redolent of a glorious past and is framed with grace and elegance. Her draughtsmanship is remarkable.

Inspired by characters from early medieval Europe she exhibits both kinds of heroine ... the innocent nymph, pure as the driven snow ... and the femme fatale who provided the inspiration to novelists in post-Revolution France and pre-Revolution Russia.

With Abbas, beautiful as her line undoubtedly is, it is not the first quality that impressed me. It is in the signifi-cance for the expression of form with the utmost lucidity, the most logical of the interrelation of parts, that I f ound so impressive.

When I walked into the Scherezade Junejo enclave I felt I was entering a different world. It was somewhere in between a sort of divine comedy and the banks of the River Styx. In the professionally produced brochure she was the only one who had this sardonic smile on her face and I knew it was because she was taking the visitor into the twilight zone.

Junejo is a purely cerebral artist, and brilliant to boot. Her compositions are precise, crisp and welldefined. Her picture of a naked somewhat ghoulish bald headed woman on a sofa covered by a white sheet, contemplating two cushions covered in fabric that, maddeningly, doesn`t match, is absolutely riveting.

The compositions of Suleman Khilji, the only male in the giftedquartet, give the impression that the artist painted them af ter looking through a pane of frosted glass. Both approach and subject matter are radically different from the rest of the entries. The `Snowing` and `Bubbles` series have a basic, primordial significance, as if they were composed in the womb and frozen in time. All his compositions in mixed media on Morocco sheet are engulfed in some kind of nebulous matter and glued together by some natural force. E