Surface of things
Julia Kjelgaard, a mid-generation American artist and university teacher, presented the work done during her six-months-long stay in India (1.Shanthi Road, July 27 to 30). The show, ambitiously titled Small ironies: weaving heaven and earth, let one expect profundity but merely touched the surface of things.

Kjelgaard, understandably for a sensitive foreigner, discovers sights, objects and substances, situations and meanings that are essential to the country but very familiar. True, almost everything has been already discovered, and only the authenticity and quality of its personal re-discovery counts. It is here that one gots disappointed by Kjelgaard who has made a cultured, methodically convincing statement which does not achieve enough conceptual and expressive power, while relying primarily on obvious aspects of the visible and their rather literal artistic interpretations. The artist has digitally transferred enlarged photographs onto vertical canvases, arranging each along the similar as well as contrasting properties of two square images.

She chooses sights of the awkwardly charming co-existence of the sacred and the commercially mundane, the archaic and the globalised, of rusticity and urban circumstance, of traditional handiwork with its organic origins and industrial product or shoddy practicality.

She also responds with empathy to the human predicament at the grass-roots level. In a feminine way alluding to local craft practices, she imprints her reactions and reflections on the photographic scenes with forms using running stitch and embroidery motifs, also ready plastic flowers, bindis and such.

Those rhythmic punctuations, grids and regular or flowing lines oscillate in diverse metamorphoses between architectural, pattern-wise stylised and natural drawing-like. There is warm humour and seriousness in the juxtaposition of a dark, old linga stone and the somewhat phallic rows of bright glass bangles.

Compassion arises from the shot of poor children on a trash heap under a grand construction. The canvas with dense, middle-class buildings picks up the grill and structure pulse in the geometric trajectory of the embroidered designs, while another with flowers and embroidered concentric circles speaks of bonds between plant-life, craft and worship.

The trouble is that the artist's gesture does not translate into powerful evocation. The spectator can read the intentions, but the general impact remains loose and somewhat snapshot-like pleasant. The weakest is the largest, horizontal work confronting-linking ordinary life, nature and labour with handiwork, decorative design, aesthetic effort and divine ritual.

All the elements, in particular the found objects, are just placed there literally, the form and content of each supposed to enhance the others, can be recognised as marked instead of being suggestive and interacting.

Middle Path
This exhibition by five artists associated with the Weavers Centre of Chennai (CKP, July 23 to 29), indicating the mid-level choice of idioms and quality. Against the dominance of the paintings — ably brushed but quite or very decorative, it was the two works by a single sculptor, T Vijayavelu that drew attention. With some wit and with raw intensity, his images play on an embodied comparison of a bird's dynamic alertness and the male organ, while the surface, in a rough-fluid manner, blends a feel of skin and vegetal or earth texture.

Texturing effects in the canvases of Sam Adikalasamy combine with a rhythmic, linear grid on the flat holding landscape elements dotted by little figures of people and mythic beings. P. Jayakani's sceneries hold architectural motifs amid strokes of shifting dynamism and abstract expanses a into pastel- hued softness. The remaining couple of painters opt for yet more conventional formal languages and themes. R Sundara Raju offers a version of modernism-based stylised ethnicity in his heavily contoured heads against even brightness of colour. R Loganathan turns easily indulgent in his series of highly abstracted Ganesha images rendered in waving and mingling rivers of many hues that come close to the effect of diluted marbling.

Easy indigenous
Different tones of a frequently loud ethnicity prevailed in the “Sounds of the Brush” exhibition which was brought by the Gallery Hues to Rain Tree (Aug 4 to 5). The selection seemed to reflect the conventional kind of range of token Indianness that is expected from a quick, not very discerning buyer.

The quiet, modernist brushing of J.M.S. Mani, the mild realism of Shankar Kendale and the graphic basis of Laxman Aelay convinced slightly better. One found Ramesh Gojrala’s work cultured and free-flowing. Another popular trend belonged to images of easily rendered traditional architecture. Minor works of Jai Zharotia and Manu Parekh represented all-India names.

Examples of established but mannered idioms belonged to Thotha Vaikuntam, Shuvaprasanna and Paresh Hazra. More sincere efforts at contemporary reality, although not entirely original, came from Palash Halder, T.M. Aziz, Vishwanath and Gayatri.

Mood-full ethnic
The rustic figures and heads by Nithin Nangare at Gallery_g (July 20 to 30), too, participate in the nostalgia for indigenous rusticity. The painter does know his skills and uses them without any crudeness.
His images, nevertheless, evoke an anachronistic, unreal and self-comforting atmosphere of soft grace, where light, elongated figures, stylised on the flat are set in gently graded abstractions of landscape with inevitable village attributes, like baskets.