KARACHI: They say your face is the mirror of your soul. But this may be just a smart-sounding phrase. Faces can deceive as well.

And that`s what attracts artists to faces: the broad space between revelation and concealment. They find it exciting to explore this space by investigating what`s behind the faces. That is exactly what a very talented painter, Zahid Mahmood Mayo, has done with his artworks which are on display at the Indus Valley School Gallery.

There are over a dozen exhibits on view and all of them are about people, alone or in a crowd. The noteworthy feature of these artworks is that there is a thread running through them. It hints at, nay speal(s of, one aspect that can be detected from all the faces that the artist has painted: loneliness. Even when they are with other men and women, the loneliness is unmistakable.

It is evident from the very first self-axiomatic exhibit called `Aloof` (oil on canvas). Still, `Aloof` may be textually too obvious for the obser-vation, which is why `Night Crowd West` (oil on canvas) makes the artist`s vision less bleary. The public is not what he wants the viewer to look at but the faces that constitute groups readily identifiable countenances.

Zahid Mahmood`s finest piece comes in the form of `Bann Ke Rehna Si` (oil on canvas), where he creates a story-within-a-story like scene and tells a whole tale in one aesthetically rich and contextually potent frame. He uses the theatre as a metaphor and puts a scantilydressed girl as a prototype of a certain kind of people. The clever thing that he does is that he doesn`t malce the girl tal
With `London` the artist shows the diversity of his talent, turning a landscape into a character.

Subsequently, he brings the show to a microcosmic level with pieces like `Islam Pura` and `Siyah Posh` (oil on canvas), where he focuses on indi-vidual faces and brings out the collective dilemma contained within them the dilemma of somethinggone amiss, or will go amiss.

The exhibition, titled `Kujh Loki, Kujh Majmay`, will last till Sept 29.