Art Historian Review (Roobina Karode)

YOUNG CONTEMPORARY INDIAN PAINTERS

I. Historically, Indian painting was canonized in the 3rd and 4th centuries A.D. establishing the 'classical' traditions, through which generations of artists executed grand narratives in miniature and mural formats. Paintings were coded with reference to the assessed artistic canons and preferences for subjects too were based on established hierarchies, with sacred and mythological themes revered over all other genres. Later in colonial times too, with the introduction of easel painting by the British, the pursuit of academic realism via the exacting labors of the oil medium led to the preferred genres of realistic portraiture and landscape, institutionalized in the art schools. In the 20th century, the early Bengal School revived the artistic decorum of the 'classical tradition' with ideal figures and indigenous aesthetics setting up the discourse around nationalism in Indian art. That moment in history perhaps demanded the consolidation of a national identity, as a form of resistance against eurocentric forces. But in due course, this form of resistance too acquired a conservative and dominating attitude, denying other voices in painting. In all this time, divergent tendencies were resisted and thus Indian painting remained coded and in the service of the intersecting forces of patronage, power or purposes that defined it.

Fixed notions of painting have continued to perpetuate in the 20th century, through art academies without much reflection. This itself has led present generations of artists to acquire a questioning attitude and look elsewhere for fresh forms of contemporary expression. In the decades of the post independence period, Indian painters have incorporated modern and post-modern tendencies to resist the revived conservatism and false identification of the 'national' in art. Dispelling loyalties to prescribed styles, methods and mediums, artists took up the challenge to dissolve hierarchies, make crossovers and experiment with a receptive and open mind, working to energise and rejuvenate the language of painting with their personal convictions. Their acts of subversion have brought under scrutiny worn-out and unadventurous expression and the question of relevance of art practices to their time.

Today, there is a much higher sense of plurality in art forms and practices in India. Younger artists have addressed the dichotomies of tradition and modernity in Indian art by negotiating an in-between. They feel free to look at both sides, pick and choose for their expressive needs from a great range of choices. Especially in the last decades of the twentieth century, if anything, artists have loosened the stiffness in art making practices to include multiple tendencies in painting, sculpture, mixed-media, photography, video-art and installation practices that represent in Indian art, a post-modern spirit. The hybridity of sources referenced, material assembled and methods scrambled, expand the language of painting and art at large. The tempers of the works vary from calm and serene to socially and politically sensitive works to issues-based provocative ones.

Interestingly, the exploration of new media has not suppressed the journey of painting in India, and it has been consistent, in that there has not been an 'either-or' response to image making that cancels the old for the new. Painting has not been declared obsolete or been pushed to the margins, precisely for the reason that it has now become inclusive, more accommodating and therefore fresh. The past is not evacuated for the present, and tradition is not completely erased for modern values. Instead, amalgamations appear and new configurations are arrived at by artists who display two significant positions from which they enter into a contemporary dialogue - one, by attempting to 'modernize the local' and others by 'localising the modern', articulating the interface of the past and present in unprecedented ways.

Contemporary Indian painting today offers the pleasure of a kaleidoscopic viewing, and however disparate, invites spectatorship and makes connections with the art viewing community.

This exhibition primarily celebrates 'the act of painting' in the works of these loosely grouped painters, who relish its processes and transformative value. Of course a group of 22 artists does not sum up the enormous talent of our younger generations. In that sense, this viewing does not represent all the tendencies of contemporary painting but rather a small and random sampling. Falling largely within the established categories of the representational and nonrepresentational, but with fresh insertions of method and content, they provide a window to the many facets of mainstream painting as it unfolds in recent times.

Today, artists work with a sense of freedom that is different from freedom as understood by artists five or six decades ago. The connotation of freedom itself has stretched to widen the space of acceptance and assimilation as well as resistance to oft used or tired expression. Artists feel little awkwardness in dealing with the past, reworking tradition with a sense of playfulness, humor and at times even a touch of irreverence. They are less inhibited and more confident of what they want, what they seek and wish to engage with. In that, they desire to work with a self-consciousness that is closer to their times, in thought and spirit. A platter full of aesthetic choices, the artist's personal and existential temperament and transgressive energies together are unleashed into their artmaking.

II. Engaging the artworks of contemporary painters is therefore quite an invigorating experience for it opens out the terrain where diverse image making practices come into focus, with personal narratives and individual initiatives played out. In these works of younger generations of painters in the exhibition, the pictorial surface has been readied to go through new surgeries, unconventional treatment, and redressal. Painting has been rejuvenated by homegrown strategies as well as adopted gestures. For instance, in this chosen group, there is a strong move away from illusionistic representations of figuration to practice formal mediations that fall within the non-representational mode. These artists do not treat painting as a visual horizon but a tactile ground. I am referring here to works by Anwar, Akhilesh, Arindam Chatterjee, Seema Ghurayya, Manish Pushkale, Sheila Makhijani, Kishor Shinde, Rajnish Kaur, Yogendra Tripathi, S.Harshavardhana, Shobha Ghare, John Tun Sein and Shalina S. Vichitra. Some of these artists, for instance Anwar, Seema, Manish, Shobha have been trained in Graphics and techniques of printmaking before they ventured into painting. Perhaps their graphic temperament is visible in their transition to the painterly medium. For Anwar, his artistic endeavors are highly inspired by J.Swaminathan's visit and talks at the Gwalior College of Art where he studied. Anwar tells me that art for him is not what he plans but what the painting reveals to him. He is convinced that a lot about his painting has to do with patience and waiting - An empty paper lies untouched on a low table before him as he circumambulates it for hours without acting upon it, waiting as if for a confirmation. There is a slow emergence of an idea/form - the artist prepares his brand of dry pastel powders that suit his needs, rubbing them into the surface through more than fifteen layers, using alternating acts of applying, smudging, effacing, rubbing till they translate into elements of 'light and air'. A slow preparedness and a timely response help the geometry of delicate but precise shapes come alive on the canvas. The use of a physical division in the pictorial space is predominant in Anwar's recent works as he decentralizes and dematerializes object-based reality to move towards that which carries its own nur (light) and wajood (presence). Anwar applies the finishing touch with a dull or shiny melamine glaze and fixes the fragile medium. The movement of a triangle or a line creates a momentary stir in the calm.

Seema Ghurayya's art seems to be in search of pure space that carries faint impressions of a world bleached and blurred of visible phenomena. There is an ideological presence of illusion, the mystical nature of existence brought to the fore. Paring away the noise and chaos of urban life, the cool reflective space of shadows and silence is evoked, with an occasional blue or white line crossing over the surface. Though oil on canvas, the work is in a limited palette - with pale grey and white tones. Seema keeps her painted world sparse and frugal, with all distractions and extraneous factors flattened out. Both Seema and Anwar's works seem to propose the 'aesthetics/ethics of disappearance' - having rigorously worked to veil all within the emptiness of the visual form. Both Anwar and Seema through their restrained act, pursue the beauty of a graphic trace.

Akhilesh creates in his colour saturated canvas, an intense opticality through the play of lines that are pulled in different directions in/with equal interval of spaces and the rhythm of the horizontal, vertical and diagonal forces casting shadows to create subtle illusions of depth and relief, that shift and move the otherwise static pattern to reverberate in the manner of a musical cadence. Musical notes, architectonic patterns and basket weaving patterns of geometry come to mind while looking at Akhilesh's work. The solitary bright brick-orange colour holds the subtle divisions of space that enhance the play of light and shadow, or then in another one, the subdued tones of earth and sky mingle to create a perfect ground for the pure white painted strings to strike a chord.

Manish Pushkale has been working on the concept of 'samayik' (which means japa or chanting) for the last three years. Manish thins down the consistency of oil to the transparency of watercolour, and applies layer upon layer till the desired effect is achieved. One observes paths of light emanating from the grid-like underlying structure. Manish superimposes triangles on squares and squares on triangles or circles. Colours create the space for forms, often translated into an illusion. Manish's colours are undefined, asocial and hardly symbolic. The fabric cut in specific shapes is used to apply as well as absorb excesses of oil paint to arrive at a smooth sequence of full and partial images through repeated and careful articulation. Manish seeks a meditative response from the pictorial space. His handling of veiling and unveiling, folding and unfolding of both the form and the process is quite amazing. He is inspired by the process of intaglio in etching, with applying and wiping off ink integral to it, and contrary to history, wishes to evolve equivalent procedures in the medium of painting.

Shobha Ghare's translucent constellation of shapes emerges as if from an underwater or underground space to acquire a languorous dreamy floating existence. Trickles of thin paint remind us of processes witnessed in nature. The luminous green colour field sustains lines, shapes, shadows, scribbles that capture the fragility of nature in its delicacy and transience.
In the works of Anwar, Seema, Shobha, Akhilesh and Manish, the understanding of Graphics and its deliberations score over the need for painterly tactility and expression - instead they yield smooth, serene and subdued reflective surfaces. On the other hand, when we observe the works of John Tun Sein, Arindam Chatterjee, Yogendra Tripathi, Harshavardhana and Kishor Shinde, they play with the raw energy of paint, the autonomous markmaking and painterly gesture that distinguishes the feel of their work from
the rest. Yogendra Tripathi retains the grainy feel of the pictorial surface and a sense of the formless, touched here and there lightly by a magical but minimal stroke. Sometimes a white line crosses over, some elemental markings as if seen in a flash of lightning bring brightness to the otherwise discrete form.

S.Harshavardhana's prolonged surface preparation is quite labor-intensive. It is laden with brisk and hard muscular movement till it acquires a body that can then be gently inscribed. Physical acts of layering, smudging, scraping, cross-hatching go in the preparation of the surface that is resplendent with self emanating light and energy. Within the grey or yellow visual field, thick or thin lines travel or then hang near the edge. Sometimes the line's carrying a shaded body with it. At times, lines greet each other and go their separate ways. The pastels create a range of illusory effects divested of material/tangible.

Arindam Chatterjee's watercolours create pockets of stark light, obscure corners and ruptured surfaces. Arindam's images do not depend on the much-desired effects of the watercolour medium, but invent impressions analogous to washed shores, corroded land, crevices and craters in earthforms. The topsy turvy, tilted de-centered views lift our gaze beyond physical boundaries, making the logic of the horizon disappear. These could be the mindscapes of distant lands, imagined zones, unexplored geographies and unconquered fear filled topographies. These could at the same time be the space that hides in the folds of our memory.

John Tun Sein's paintings are a departure from the habitual continuous painterly space. John likes to break the uniform pictorial space with a difference. After applying and drying the first layer of white wall color on the paper, he crushes the paper and opens it up to discover random creases and flaking of paint create spatial divisions that give him the lead to proceed from there on. John, though trained as a conventional painter, opts for a child-like engagement with the two-dimensional surface, enjoying the sense of surprise and suspense in his creative process and the appearance of accidental forms. John told me, he loves solitude for "my work exists in silence. My painting is conceived without words and hence has only visual content." Triangular forms become regular repetitions creating a pattern quite complex. John uses pigment powder that he prepares himself and mixes with an adhesive solution to get the intense earth color and rich ultramarine blue he is so fond of. It is necessary for John that his painting follow an internal spontaneous order. Like John, there are other artists in this group who believe in 'submission to space' rather than dominance over it. John also reinforces the thesis that individual initiatives in art making provide clues to the artist's persona and mental make-up.

Sheila Makhijani's alertness to sensations around - hypersensitive to movement, sound, echoes, flutters or a whisper - translates into a breathing imaginative form in her drawings and paintings. People, nature and man-made environment from where experiential bits and pieces enter her mind are translated into an exhilarating act of pure drawing and painting. Sheila's pictorial world is an unframed space, it sprouts and intuitively spreads out, with form and space caught in constant hide and seek. Sheila at the outset, makes the paper wet to allows the brushstroke of colour to blot and spread - take its own shape. What perhaps is most engaging is Sheila's intricate interweaving of lines within lines, the white within the blue and the blue within the orange. Sheila plays on the visual field, placing the opaque against the transparent, the ascending against the descending force, a delicate linear flutter against a body of paint, bridging and spanning inaccessible areas and leaving parts suspended. She draws innumerable connectivities that get more and more miniaturized to almost become invisible to the eye, a challenge Sheila never gives up as she constantly seeks corners that can be possibly inhabited by lines. The artist's pictorial surface is but her personal space to spread her wings, and art making an act of liberation, where social and cultural considerations are ejected to enjoy the challenge and ecstasy of being able to create. Forms fly, fall, fill and run over each other, taking us in and out of space as a sewing needle does. The fragile wiry ladders fly outward from the center often nowhere but to swing in the untouched, air-like space. These visual structures are extremely complex, and vulnerable, both at the level of conception and execution, minutely painted in parts as if with the eye of a fly.

And we have artists who love to indulge paint and truly celebrate the painterly approach, for instance Kishor Shinde and Rajnish Kaur. One observes a painterly exuberance, in fact a painterly indulgence in Rajnish's pastels and Shinde's paintings. Rajnish uses pastel paper with a grainy surface that grows heavier and thicker with the overload of pastels. There is a consistency in her work, which results from her process of working. Not following any one procedure to begin and proceed with, she starts instinctively stroking the oil pastel on the surface, leaving white spaces for later use. The registration of various stages, time, reworking of parts is an aesthetic imperative. Colour, the primary force is not a filling element in Rajnish's work. When closely examined it is a result of linear stroking by small and long pastel strokes. Also, the layering is not equal in all places and thus brings a kind of subtle relief. Too dense areas are treated with color shapers. Rajnish realises her different body-responses while working in canvas and oil. In terms of applicability too, the canvas retains the colour on the surface while the paper keeps absorbing the colour and invites more working. It is also the soft smudgy quality of pastels that takes a longer time to build its body. Though there are few referential elements in Rajnish's world, she has reduced the interpretative possibility of her work, which is always in the process of balancing a visual density.

Kishor Shinde's paintings are not about definite forms but about energizing the making of a bold expressive script. The external stimuli all around are extracted by the artist and transformed into an abstract communication. From there onwards, the artist believes, the painting grows organically, taking on as if on its own, from within itself. The invisible aspects of visible phenomena engage Shinde who scans them, blurring recognizable definite forms to register their formless mappings. These are pictorial constructions that capture the swirling rhythms of a painterly approach; where the brushstroke takes on unexpected journeys, takes on different colors and directions. Shinde's dispersed tactility with frequent swelling of pigment leads to multi dimensional effects. There is a nomadic force in the movement of paint on the surface, building it up in the large area of his canvas. Shinde transfers his emotional energies into the process to invent a haptic rather than optic space.

Also notable amongst these artists is that they are making unconventional marriages between mediums and surfaces. For example, using oil on cartridge paper, watercolour on canvas, acrylic touches both in oil and watercolour and even with pastels. Adhesive solutions, glazes, fabric impressions are technical manoeuvres that artists employ with a scientific temper at times, but also through chance explorations.

Shalina even goes beyond that as she collages her paper base with mixed media and material tit bits for a meaningful integration. The surface is enriched with transfers of various textures, contours accentuated with wrapping paper on the cotton chord, discard material put to new aesthetic use. A lot in her work is determined by her travels and trekking trips, which unravel fresh topographical views and an alternate reality of earthforms. In one of the canvases, Shalina uses a thick textured grey acrylic base with a pink overlay to represent a solid chunk of earth inhabited by the local nomadic Changspa tribe, living on the borders of Tibet and Ladakh. Dictated by nature and its seasonal cycles, they cross borders and migrate to Tibet for grazing pastures and survival. Shalina uses deep and dark charcoal lines for an aerial mapping of the place that appears in its irregular geometry. The small and big distinct shaped tent-like structures scattered on this chunk of earth suggest how settled they feel in their unsettled way of life. The solid space of modern buildings in definite squares and verticals are deliberately juxtaposed against the fluid and moving locations of the tents. Shalina's powers of perception and retention help imaginative transformations of the stimuli into a quasi-abstract mapping, evolved by the expressive use of lines and patterned shapes. The other canvas is inspired by the prayer flags, stuck into the earth and snow by local tribes with the belief that when winds blows, the flutter of the flags carries their prayers to God.

The nuanced abstractions of these painters seek meditative quality in their work, or a catharsis that evacuates the excess energies of the mind and calms the restlessness of the
physical self.

III. On the representational front, artists are neither in the mood to pursue the mimetic representation of the world for visual exactitude nor to be loyal to academic realism. They instead allow the flow of the popular, kitsch, folk, and the naïve into their works. There is also a subversive play to traditions that spill over into their works.

Manisha Gera Baswani enjoys reworking and rejuvenating the miniature tradition with contemporary awareness. There is an interesting assortment of painterly styles referenced by Manisha, from Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Popular Art, Readymades like tattoos, in her watercolours, gouaches, pastels and oil intermittently used by her to fulfill her visual expression. Manisha loves to capture the romance of everyday life in her work, with autobiographical references presented in symbols and metaphors. In Home-Made, the bee and the beehive are metaphors for home, nurture and other symbolic associations that can be expanded from home to motherland. In another, the baby quilt is painted in feminine pastel shades with delicate miniature working that creates a certain mood. The half curtain, a pillow, and other incongruous elements are bound together by the whiteness of the silver blank board, its emptiness waiting to be filled by the arrival of a child. The lyrical and the decorative have a place in Gera's artistic language but are tinged with humor and playfulness.

Naina Kanodia's wit is expressed through a naïve, decorative extravagance in her art. Using a sort of profuse wall-paper like aesthetics, she has at the same time kept a window opened to global influences. We often see Henri Matisse's paintings hanging in her painted interiors. The indoor view of a well furnished home, with objects and figures arranged in a pleasing uncomplicated manner, has flowers and geometric patterns help order the inhabited space. The well dressed manicured family, and their preferred popular tastes displayed in the interior of the middle class home reflect those over-perfected Indian middle class utopian dreams, filled with all the accessories - the icons of gods, the T.V., carpet, and flowerpots and lovely pets. The folded curtain of the window frames the beautiful view of the outdoor locale.

K. Muralidharan's mask-like stylized human head is overwhelming in its presence, almost like an icon drawn from local myth or folklore. The animals and birds shown circling around the human, dance to his bansuri's dhun. Muralidharan too experiments with various formal styles. The geometric box- like face creates a three dimensionality while the reduced scales of the images around make its presence almost sculptural. The unnaturalistic tendencies in dealing with the figurative confirm the disinterest in academic realism and a reversal to folk, tribal and pre-historic forms and influences.

Sohini Dhar and Ramlal Dhar's poetic, colour-soaked landscapes are intense in their moods. Sohini uses pastels, and Ramlal uses gouache to paint elemental forms, in the manner of a naïve painter who converts the visible landscape into an imaginative one. Simple play of visual elements and technical innovativeness construct their pictoriality. Sohini's landscapes lose their immediate atmosphere and freeze into pictorial symbols. Pastels are used skillfully to create textile and tactile effects in the work that bring a sense of decorativeness to their art practice. Ramlal Dhar's works are similar in intent but incorporate the man-made in their natural setting. Neeraj Goswami's oil pastel on board exhibits a different kind of sensibility. He plays with the sense of volume and scale heightened into the miniature-sized work. The singular image has a geometric sharp edged precise form, which inspite of its transparency carries a visual solidity and serenity.

Jayasri Burman's paper-surface is filled with a decorative extravagance with myth and reality shaping each other in her work. The flora and fauna intimately touch and grow from within the human, leading to the many metamorphosed forms. The sepia wash is to impart the feel of an old parchment-like paper that has acquired stains and partial effacements. The composite figures turn the objects into cultic and iconic forms that reminisce the Egyptian, Venetian and other eclectic sources that flow into her world. The drawing of the stereotypical forms has an illustrative quality, and Jayasri enjoys the translation of illusionistic treatment associated with the oil medium to watercolour with her unusual layering. She sticks to the frontal vision, bordered picture-making aesthetics in the hope of creating a painterly fusion of the East and West through her mixed choices.

The long Indian tradition of stylized nature seems a reference point for Bhagat Singh, who is still under the spell of the classical tradition of painting, though working on the easel. He marries the sensuousness of nature with the sensuality of the oil medium. For Bhagat, it is nature caught in a dreamy flurry state. The resulting soft erotic forms are frozen in a wild moment with leaves that twist, turn, open and fold in the aftermath of spring. Nature is captured in rich concentrated colours, smoothly blended in their application. The patterned and stylized, ornamental style of Bhagat is both lyrical and evocative. The hot red and the shaded greens create a chemistry with each other and Bhagat is in the process of evolving his style of painting that will modify the decorativeness to revive meaningfully the romance and beauty missing in the realm of painting.

The work of Jayashree Chakravarty is most interestingly positioned in the 'in-between' space of painting, negotiating the representational and non-representational categories. Jayashree's mastery over her alternating sense of painterly spilling and control, randomness and order is simply amazing. The monochrome layers of the painting carry colours of archaeology, of retrieval and recovery, attaining a personal language comprised of a graffiti of memories and lost scripts, drawing and writing the canvas simultaneously, destroying the perfect, easy, blended, perspectival representation of the world. The work explodes on the surface, making the canvas extremely dense, overpopulated with stimuli. In spite of the commotion and visual stir, the strong profiled face seems unfettered and frozen, gazing into distance, losing the present when in a state of submergence. Excavating the overlapped layers of memory that spill all around, leave no breathing space. The ochres, blacks and whites create a pitch of their own in the intricate markings. Amidst the effect of cracked walls, effacements and erasures, Jayashree intensifies the hope of 'retention' giving definite forms to recurrent images such as the castle, railway lines, the clock tower, people and scientific instruments. They seem to surface as dream symbols rooted deep in her unconscious. The raw emotional energy and frantic rhythm speak of the urgency to record that which she fears will fade. Hence, the routing and mapping of the 'self' becomes a spiritual exigency.

Jayashree's work seeks unconventionality in the conventional. She perhaps sums up best the position of the contemporary painter who makes crossovers at various levels - from one medium to another and stylistically too, enmeshing the abstract and the figural. This openness to make and break rules is making painting today, more elastic than plastic, more mobile than frozen, less prescribed to be more inscribed with individual artist's personal scripts and expression. Painting in India will remain alive and well if contemporary artists continue to empower it with the signification of our times.