Seductive destruction
“Zones of Conflict”, Nandesh Shanti Prakash's exhibition at No.1 Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery (Aug 10 to 12), was an unusual event. Its striking interactive character revealed the sincerity of the artist's engagement with environmental destruction as well as compelled the viewer to an immediate psychosomatic response.
The four works painted in acrylic and photo-luminescent pigments seemed serene or exuberantly bright and seductive when illuminated to drastically alter their form in darkness acquiring an eerie glow against black backgrounds. The light switching off and on depending on the movement of the spectators made one disoriented - sensing a connection between the light and one's body but not able to locate it. This caused anxiety, especially that surrounded by the mutating images one could read their changing content only in bits over a scattered duration. Uncertainty and fragmentation yielded a mood of ominous expectation under the harsh poetry of the whole.
 Central to the show was Silence - a cut out silhouette of da Vinci's grand universal man whose weak legs lay horizontally on the floor. In the dark, his truncated torso became a desolate landscape inscribed with words narrating a tale about a town whose natural beauty and people had been ravaged by technological pollution. The three canvases, literally and metaphorically as well as evocatively, manifested the two phases of the same state while addressing different areas of its occurrence.
In Venus Fly Trap, the artist transforms an image of the gorgeous carnivore flower into a sign of nuclear peril with a couple of archaic figures of fertility and martial love being caught inside. I Swear has Botticelli's allegory of spring rising from the sea on a shell that disquietingly suggests the familiar multinational logo, everything being encircled by the viewfinder of a gun. The colourful aspect of Mass refers to multiplying humanity and the insufficiently solid globe, whereas its dark one retains merely the violent shark-like airplanes passing through the black surface.
Between the stated and the evoked, Nandesh , with empathy but convinced about the bleak future, extends his concern to the organic and intimate, industrial and political sides of life. His aesthetic method reflects the same in the use of forms, compositional ways, motifs and materials typical to advertising and design. The alluring artificiality of their glamour hints at the rapacity of human desires which extracts vitality from organic sources, alters it conveniently and leaves it exhausted and denatured.
The effects of computer-generated hues and digitally diffused auras, however, have been brushed by hand, thus imbuing the calculated technological brilliance with emotive intensity. It would have been unfair perhaps to discuss certain drawbacks of the works considering the authenticity, scale and passion that are evident here.
Classics
Bangalore's Youth Photographic Society held a display of works by 38 of its members who have won international distinctions and awards (Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Aug 18 to 19). As a gesture of tribute, it emphasised traditional qualities both in the images by the older generation lens-men and the younger ones. Even if such profile was caused partly by the organisers' choices, the same could only stress the overall concept of photography behind - one shaped by a limited number of classic paradigms and conventions, in fact, the former frequently turning into the latter.
On the one hand, there were some landscape prints and portraits of a gracefully unassuming and genuine spirit (G Thomas, D V Rao) beside comparatively more ample wild-life scenes that sensitively picked up and enhanced natural appearance and behaviour of animals and birds in their habitat (T N A Perumal, E Hanumantha Rao, H Satish, S R Jayaprakash, M Janardhan, K.M. Narayana Swamy, G. Harinarayana, S. Lokesh). On the other hand however, such shots follow a few established ways suggesting a lack of originality. This could be observed further in the recurring near-repetitions of C. Rajagopal's famous picture with a herd against misty radiance of sunset as well as in the relatively sporadic commercial influence on still-life, scenery prints.
Although genuinely appropriated classicism always has its value, what disappointed was the complete absence of original contemporary sensitivities and methods, even of engagement with reality.
Stylised
The canvases in the "Faces of Kerala" collection by K.R. Babu (Vermillion House, August 10 to 16) strive to contemporise the tradition of mural painting in that state which the painter grew up with and taught. He retains some properties of the canon, like the vibrant, contrasting colours and the volume-inducing shading along contours, but simplifies those for the evocation of present-day feminine charm and nature. This is done, yet, with an excessive amount of stylised sweetness and oriented towards design, which results in mere decorativeness - pleasant but inexpressive.
Obvious
Usha Doss of Chennai paints mainly old interiors with an emphasis on obviously rendered architectural structure and detail in deep, sometimes multiple recesses. The intended saturation of atmospheres, yet, ends in a decorative, even loud surface-bound impact. She tries to bring out intensity in her impastoed depictions of dancers and worshippers of divine statues without loosening enough to achieve it.
Although well skilled, her realistic portraits of children and sketchy images based on children's drawings have a wooden tone and a mannerist one respectively, the last trait prevailing in the bright Ganesha pictures.