The sometimes slender, sometimes fleshy figures in Musavi’s pictures are always masterfully drawn, but there is an additional device at play here. Although painted in oils, they employ a muted, sepia palette, which lends them the appearance of aged drawings on paper, or charcoal rubbings. This trompe-l’oeil ostensibly suggests drawings passed down to us from the European Renaissance, but more than one old art form finds expression here. The combination of stony colors and dignified features makes some of these works recall painted depictions of impassive sculptures, while somewhat limiting their emotional impact in works such as Caring and Anticipation (all works 2017).

Where Naqsh succeeds in avoiding this side-effect, it is through his superlative draughtsmanship—subtly and sorrowfully slanting the line of an eyelid in Gathering II, accentuating a bottom lip as in Serenity, or tilting and shading the head in a delicate expression of hope in Nurturing—that the artist lends inner lives to his figures.

The women also eschew the semblance of petrification in Naqsh’s paintings, where they do not assume the posed stance of a sculpture’s subject, but rather appear to be caught off guard. In Slumber and Repose, the figures lie on their sides while pigeons rest near them, eyes closed and oblivious. In Introspection, the subject sits grasping her legs to her chest, face folded into her knees in an expression far removed from the near-portraiture of other pieces.

The problem posed by posing, which these more naturalistic pictures successfully evade, also extends to the stories behind these works. With the depiction of pigeons and references to ghazal poetry, they are ostensibly tapping into a narrative tradition concerned with love at a distance, where the solitary lover has only these birds for comfort as symbols of their absent beloved. The poses many of these women assume, and the gazes they direct out of the pictures to meet our own, put a strain on that romantic notion of solitude.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with a woman in a painting meeting the viewer’s gaze. Indeed, French painter Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) represented something of a much-needed shock in the history of oil painting when his subject—an acknowledged courtesan—looked defiantly out from the canvas to meet the eyes of the bourgeois gentlemen who viewed her. However, there is no indication of any such attempt to break the mold here. There can be no doubt that the figures in “And the Eternal Feminine” are beautifully rendered and moving in their evocation of a romantic poetic tradition, but they also make a claim to the traditions of Western painting, and the device of making these images appear aged is telling. From history they have inherited not only an aesthetic but, as the late critic John Berger would have it, a way of seeing. Unless we are to accept that the natural and perennial state of femininity is to pine after an absent lover, a more appropriate title might be: “And the Eternal Feminine (as Seen by Male Painters).”

Jamil Naqsh’s “And the Eternal Feminine” is on view at Pontone Gallery, London, until August 27, 2017.

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