Literal literary

Rollie Mukherjee is a young art historian educated in Santiniketan and Baroda who has been teaching at Bangalore University and CKP for a few years now.

One can empathise with her sincere engagement in host of vital and disturbing issues from a woman's dilemmas in a patriarchal society to environmental degradation and farmers' suicides. She takes it all very personally looking at "The Other (as) Self", like the title of her recent exhibition proclaimed (1, Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery, November 24 to 27). The trouble, however, is that she treats art-making as if it was words accompanying-explaining images.

There is usually a multitude of such meaning-bearing forms, each drawn either from diverse sources of art history or from the surrounding world, more often than not from both, and each becomes invested by complex, personal interpretations.

The whole is expected to read in terms of a text, which gets not only tiresome but rather impossible without verbal explication. Even knowing that, one feels unconvinced, since on one's own one could have given a number of other possibilities of reference.

The confusion increases further because of the several, very different stylistic sources from various places and eras as well as almost as many idiomatic options the artist adopts for herself besides formal quotations. In the end, her works oscillate between the illustrational when simpler and accessible to normal comprehension and the rebus-like around an over-complicated and dense symbolism of her own construction.

The spectator so may respond better to the more direct images, for instance the "Exchange" between the poetic aspirations of a young girl and the burdens the older one demonstrates to her. Even here, yet, her essentialist
realism comes through somewhat naively and with a degree of stylisation.

Although these elements are present, together with uncertainty about the exact content, in the ink wash images of a female figure wrestling with mostly male shadows, these at least some freer expressiveness. The consciously assumed contemporary innocent naivety against its equivalents in folklore and botanical citations does not quite link, even if the paintings look attractive. Elsewhere there are insufficiently fleshed out shifts from the expressionistic to the pleasant and the vaguely simplified.

The artist appears to have forgotten that art should offer an experience of states, sensations and thoughts, not worded jigsaw-puzzles.

Playing with textured pigments

The young painter from Gulbarga Goutam V Andani is striving to capture things simple but vital both in the basics of his art material and in reference to sensing reality. The "Colour Reflection of my Mind" exhibition (CKP, November 25 to 28) emphasised these premises by the ambitious sizes of his works and the focus on a limited number of images and often almost monochromatic hues. Some of these square acrylics forms equal grids filled with shallow relief depictions of various elemental substances and rhythms from sperms to less defined bubbles or cosmic spirals with a sporadic mundane object of utility — a chair or telephone.

Some other pieces enlarge such single motifs and pulses under enhanced textures that rely heavily on a combination of raised linear ridges, smooth background and somewhat design-resembling but fairly painterly textures. One can recognise an effort to make the images contemporary through a tone of minimalism and certain ways of arranging loose markings or more regular dots. Somewhere, however, the artist reverts to a more old-fashioned indigenous symbolism seen in terms of design. Although his workmanship skills are considerable, he tends to employ the same towards a decorative impact.

Stylised pleasantries

Conversation with Colours" was a display of large and mostly bright paintings on over-familiar, comfortable themes brought to Time & Space by Mumbai's Colorido (December 1 to 8). One reacted relatively well to the unselfconsciously joyful, whimsical and animated images of animals by Dhaneshwar Shah which without being literal allude to the spirit of folk art.

Shampa Sirkar Das and Vijay L. Dupatre offered a feminine and a masculine version of the human condition, trying for a contemporary effect but remaining dependent on a popular, rather safe and indifferent convention. Far more clichéd and dated were the sweetly mannered ethnic figures by Jagannath Paul and Ramesh Kumar. Madhu Sharma's view of human-animal togetherness and hybrid state meant to convey beauty with eerie lyricism but ended as cute.

Cultured form

The dual show by Madhu Arya M N and Shwetha S held at the CKP later in November proved that those final year students of the institution's college are striving for engagement with contemporary aesthetic ways and vital insights into reality. Cultured and unpretentious, they nevertheless explore already probed fields formally.

What one appreciates is the sincerity of it. Arya's paintings focus on the human foetus facing formation, bonding and identity. Shwetha combines pigments on canvas with draped, painted over fabric. Whether she aims at sensing intimate clothing or one that shrouds icons, the process stays mostly within the limits of the aesthetic.

Towards contemporarines

The large "Mixed Bag - 2007" show by mostly young artists associated with Gulbarga's College of Visual Art, displayed at the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath late last month, suggested that the situation in their educational institution is improving.

Not spectacular perhaps, the array of mainly paintings was fortunately devoid of anachronistic stylisations and academic exercises, while formalist abstractions were infrequent.

Evidently, the painters are trying for contemporary aesthetics along with responding to sights and problems of their surroundings.

They may be doing this hesitantly and adopting fairly tested ways with figuration, but they almost never imitate a specific idiom.

Of the more interesting names one should mention the serious Sharanu Allolli and Sanjay Chowdary, also Mallappa C. Dhole for his humour.