Zakkir Husain’s new body of work – 103° C Yellow Fever – is not easy on the eyes. To begin with, there is no centre of composition in most of his paintings, and the viewer is assaulted by an orgy of images that spreads chaotically across the canvas. It also doesn’t help that these images mostly comprise dismembered human bodies, mutilated animals like birds and fish, and grotesque figures that could very well be out of some Victorian museum of sideshow freaks.

It is credit to the artist that, rather than averting your gaze, you move from one work to the next, fascinated and strangely compelled. The chaos draws you in.

Zakkir seeks inspiration for this series in the “violence of the everyday”, and conveys this subtly by placing certain mundane objects within the narrative – a chair, an umbrella, a wash basin, even an old-fashioned long-stemmed fan. (Oddly enough, these are what look out of place.) The violence lies, the artist seems to suggest, in ourselves, as receptacles of a million different urban sensory experiences pertaining to sight, smell, thought and sound.

 

An untitled polyptych illustrates this well. Comprising four paintings, the work captures what looks like a scene from a mad scientist’s laboratory. A headless man squats on a long operating table on which lies an elongated human figure filled with a multitude of hearts tugged at by a train. Around them are a tangle of figures, animal and body parts, and urban elements. For example, in one corner rises a concrete apartment block out of a clump of torsos, while nearby a car swallows a man’s head. Most disturbing, however, is a couple dangling off a mechanical hook - like fish being pulled out of water.

Just as disconcerting is the untitled triptych: the largest of the three paintings shows a human figure, head first in a meat grinder with a feather-less skeletal vulture waiting on the side. The smaller second painting echoes the polyptych in its strange clinical atmosphere. It shows a seated man surrounded by what seems to be medical equipment that morphs into human heads with bound mouths. There is no way for them to voice their discomfort or fear.

Some of the other works are, if not less disturbing, more quiet and orderly. There are a couple of paintings that incorporate a sapphire-coloured river, yet even here water offers no healing or consolation. In both there is a bridge with a marching crowd stepping over human and animal carcasses. The first has an armour-clad warrior on the other side, whose steel seat is knifed through the human torso “horse” it is riding. In the second, the river itself is filled with bound naked figures balancing blank flags on their mouths and the bank teems with twisted representations of holiday-makers - an umbrella grows out of someone’s mouth while a picnic blanket smothers another.

Perhaps the work that best captures the relentless grind of urban life is one that shows an apartment block dangling from a clothes hanger, where a female face beneath it spews out human torsos (that also look like red dresses) that fall into an Indian-style toilet.

However unbelievable, the morbidity of Zakkir’s works does not get overwhelming, which in itself is testament to the premise of the show - that the onslaught of visceral experience in our everyday lives is numbing and anesthetizing. Going by the title of the show, yellow fever affects a person’s sight and visibility. In some cases the patient is left with the inability to see or recognise the colours of the spectrum. The metaphor that Zakkir uses to draw parallels with our incapability to see and receive certain aspects of the world is a tragic one. It is an illness with no cure.