Non-representational art, resistant to easy recall and reading as it is, hasn’t quite become viewer-friendly and remains on the fringes of the art market. In public perception, it isn’t enough to merely enjoy this art, as one does instrumental music; one must, it’s felt, understand it — a daunting call. Yet, there are those who have persisted with abstraction. Like Yusuf of Bhopal, who shows his paintings and drawings at CIMA gallery till November 7.

Yusuf began with figuration, though. Like most artists. But then, he discovered the seduction of lines and autonomous forms shorn of meaning. The seduction of manipulating chaste lines to counterpoint space would allow great imaginative stimulation in terms of form. Adding paint imported body and colour, and the tactility of textures, opening up possibilities that were truly endless. As endless as the octave that creates symphonies. Or the letters of the alphabet that make up words and sentences.

This shift away from the objective seems to have led to a fairly rigorous approach in Yusuf, an approach that transcends humanism and narratives. At the same time, he has rejected both the lyrical romanticism that often informs semi-geometric landscapes and the emotional excess one identifies with expressionism, achieving, in the process, a degree of invisibility.

Because, while Yusuf the artist asserts his presence through his craft — the tiny ink marks and scatter of dots, the tease of textures and play of planes — Yusuf the man manages to remain absent. No meaning is imposed on the viewer, who is left to make what he will of these acrylics. No autobiographical leads are offered barring, possibly, oblique echoes in them of the rugged landscape of his state, Madhya Pradesh. However, geographical labels would be too limiting for formations that appear primordial.

But yes, if you were to look for a category under which to slot Yusuf, it would, indeed, be tempered expressionism. Yet, the tectonic pulls the paintings suggest through their configuration of lines and space, planes and textures, speak of a studied distance rather than a personal outpouring. As though the awe awakened by nature’s drama is calibrated, like that of an enquiring scientist, rather than wide-eyed, like that of religious mysticism.

Still, the enigma of unfathomable forces lends power to the paintings. Forces that inscribe the wear of ages on craggy surfaces in spectra of earth tones, forces that tear hefty chunks apart or join them in layered masses and send jagged flakes drifting in a space that’s often beige or a brilliant red, forces that work not along charted courses but by some cosmic accident for they are too big to be contained within the design of human reckoning. Though the palette in these acrylics is restricted — and in an earlier work is monochromatic — his small variations of tone and density along with minutely worked surface textures conjure up a wealth of illusions: depth, motion, substance.

Rather different, however, are the black-and-white drawings on handmade paper pasted on boards. These are mostly agile black bands whose calligraphic elegance brings to mind ideograms and evoke, briefly, the brusque grace and spontaneous strokes of Franz Kline abstractions. But, as in Kline’s work, these are not as hermetic as they seem at first glance, nor as spontaneous.

Their shapes yield biomorphic references, while the fringe of capillaries at the ends holds out quirky suggestions: a figure bending to throw its splayed hair forward, or an uprooted tree turned upside down. Plant life is summoned in other drawings too: a feminine trunk appears fecund in the shoots it sprouts; a rounded seed or fruit, covered with a mesh of lines, seems ready to be stripped down to its kernel, much like a coconut. What appears spontaneous at first is revealed, on scrutiny, as a painstaking load of details; of fine ink lines and shades of black and grey, subtly differentiated. But it’s not so much their chance reflection of images as the sheer dynamism of the strokes that imbues these signs with untamed life. Like the drawing of what looks like two Cs facing each other — or two eyes — interlocked in a breezy, balletic movement, as it were.

Each work is marked by what has become Yusuf’s unmistakable signature: the arrangement of nervy horizontal lines that run across the handmade paper or canvas he uses, even over the paintings and drawings.

The device, interestingly, alludes to palm fronds — which did the work of paper in this country’s pre-paper days — or blinds with narrow slats that are, hence, immanently collapsible. And thus, ultimately, mutable.