Colours of looking  passionately

On entering the exhibition Mahesh G (No.1, Shanthi Road, April 19 to 21), a young artist from Mysore, one faced the painting ‘Fear’. The loose-tight and very intense portrait, possibly of the self, is all red on an empty ground.

Its realistic core permeated by an expressionist overstress combines disturbing sensations with some distanced humour and intimate warmth. The certain awkwardness of brushing seems to spontaneously come from workmanship limitations as well as be consciously harnessed towards evocation. The colour and the meat of the image arise from and hold the emotions tinted by seeing things outer and inner. This, indeed, is the subject-matter of Mahesh’s art.

He pictures himself as an odd, black man responding from within by his observations and reflections which mould his body. Immersed in the mundane urban reality and his rural roots, he pictures himself with an alter ego _ a leucoderma white figure that stands for his partial alienation from the origins and his art-historical, westernised awareness. This is how he depicts the world around him, from the rough actuality passionately and with some distance shaping metaphors for his thinking and feeling about the immediate world and for the hybrid nature of human emotions and condition. Quite in tune with the surrounding ethos, he starts out from the literal and the unadorned, almost brutal to bring out poetry. 

His imagery is populated by working-class characters in their environment, but their looks and placement become twisted for the sake of mood and interpretation. For instance, he paints a nocturnal park scene with a mother and child on a bench topped by a curtain being opened by a hand, saying that ‘Life is not a Drama’. Elsewhere he shows a man as a bull-tiger freely displaying his nature at home only to put on a restrained normal appearance for the outside. An interesting oil on canvas _ ‘Ways of Seeing’ sums up his credo, and among many disembodied eyes has people, animals and plants with faces and arms tinted by their desires as well as blindness. Even though not all is perfect in his workmanship, one truly appreciates the sincerity, honesty and authenticity of the experience and the ways of conveying it.

Designing stark reality

Credible India’ was the photography exhibition by German Christine Kalweit who is staying in the city now (Tasveer, April 5 to 17). The artist responds to the grim as well as beautiful realities of the place with its poverty, social or gender inequalities and mess, but also to the fervour and simultaneity of different religious faiths.

Kalweit’s design education must have weighed on the directness of her viewing, because she seems to be excessively compelled to transpose shots from the actual into rather evident formal compositions that, besides obvious statements and sarcasm, rely on collage, mirrored repetition and such. 

In fact, she tried somewhat forcibly to combine the photography basis of her work with installation, verbal statement and ironic comment while using perhaps too many aesthetic means inclusive of graphic-like images on transparent film or mounted on and in boxes. Much better effects are achieved through a compact unity of form and topic, as in the faux-period, sepia-toned ‘burning women’ with their eerie fire radiance.

Restraint helps, like in ‘Bangalore reality’ where she sparingly colours children's figures among the otherwise black and white density of urban buildings and huge mounts of trash.

The triptych printed on gradually fading corrugated sheets with men pissing on a dilapidated wall convinces, too, thanks to its being self-evocative.

Textured tradition

A Divine Encounter’, Appanna Pujari's new paintings at Kynkyny (April 14 to 30), brings a slightly changed continuation of his steady anchor in decoratively contemporised southern canon.

The many gods depicted in mythological episodes follow the iconography and the main aesthetic means related to it, while imbuing the figures somewhat with a warm-humorous humanity. The caricature exaggeration of his earlier style has been subdued for the sake of some voluptuous grace. The whole, although consummately rendered, remains fairly easy and formulaic with its stress on patchy textures and smoothly arching contours.

Pleasantness

The paintings by professional artists and by children from Christel House India had little in common except for the overall pleasantness. Organised by Renaissance at Leela Palace (April 22) to continue at the gallery, the show has Sachin Jaltare, Sanjay Ashthapatre, Chippa Sudhakar, K Srinivasachara and Samson A from Hyderabad.
Their paintings represent diverse idioms typified, however, by a hesitant contemporariness without gravity, instead dedicated to pleasant effects of light or design-based figuration and abstract indulgencies.

The children’s works sporadically show free imagination, but are more often constrained by adult guidance.