Blurring truth
One is overly familiar with versions of mediatic realism where elements of TV and glamour imagery are used to expose among others the hypocritical prettification of global war cruelties. It becomes refreshing then to see a mature artist address the subject metaphorically but from a position of the actual in order to reach for the condition of the human soul. The Baroda-based painter, Arunanshu Chowdhury does that in his perhaps too cerebrally called exhibition "probabilities of occurring" which has been brought to Sumukha by Mumbai's gallery The Guild (December 21 to January 8). The title refers to the unclear as well as deliberately obfuscated processes of the American-led assault on Asian countries, maybe not only those.
Throughout, the artist plays on the ambiguity of the signage sourced from ordinary life and art history that asserts the presence and values of the indigenous individual, and that becomes transformed into a symbol of threat and of the aggressor's power. Thus he embodies both the appropriation and elimination of the conquered by the conqueror. The same ambiguity together with motifs of beauty and innocence, underscored by witty sarcasm and lyrical gravity, serves him to hint at the smoothing, making unreal of the bloody facts, well-known from terms, like collateral damage and liberation or democratising. At the same time, Chowdhury has faith in the resisting capacity of the vanquished. The focus on human fate in uncertain transition gains from the very absence of human figures, while objects of daily comfort and pleasure witness it, absorb and raise to evocative symbolism.
It often is the old-fashioned barber's chair - still warm but eerily steely and perilous. Against a dilapidated wall covered by children's graffiti with bomber planes, it stands on a landscape of turbulence and life discarded like hair shavings.
The chair of the mighty, yet, becomes a sign of people's aspiration and redeeming pain, when gracefully ornate amid rose flowers and radiant hazes receives Christ from the cross and William Blake's nudes of spirituality.
Chowdhury's "Welcome Carpet" images conjure delicate tapestries from Islamic manuscripts and ancient Thai statuary as carpets open to precision bombs that seem to be toys. The vast size of the canvases makes the imagery iconic drawing irony from the gentle, pastel hues. It also lets the spectator sense the strength of ordinary reality capable of resisting assault, for instance, in the diptych with an Indian auto-rickshaw by a boulder-fortified river and a Cambodian one set against misty photographs of rebels.
The onslaught on India is economical; hence its scenery proves calmer and much more confusing. It is a kaleidoscope, even jigsaw-puzzle, of miniaturised domestic and sacred objects, architecture, cars and toys over which current life is represented by a large, manual machine or a vendor's cart while it faces blurring stretches of glorious old monuments. Within the wretchedness and the mess, the artist sees some hope and some effort to connect and to ascend. One really appreciates the works relying on firm realism in combination with metaphoric motifs, hazes and erasures. If the proportion is reversed, the impact tends to get a little vague. Sometimes, the viewer needs additional information to understand the intentions.
Comfortable rusticity
The latest show at Kynkyny (December 10 to 23) offered paintings of two artists who use academic but fairly light realism to depict simple and actual but rather comfortably interpreted scenes from rustic life. Equipped with consummate technical abilities and some freedom, they nevertheless direct those at evoking a surface-bound pleasantness. Mahesh Kumar's village types are light under his water colours, but an excess of blurred, formalist design turns them somewhat decorative. Sivabalan's women with pots, holy bulls and cyclists are much more literal in their precise detailing, the gay brightness in sunshine and the cast shadows. Their effect, however, has the same quality.
Skilled exercises
The annual sculpture exhibition - 2007" by the Karnataka Shilpakala Academy at the Ravindra Kalakshetra (December 15 to 22) presented a quite expected picture of this branch of art as practiced on the middle level. It suggested that often sound or excellent skills were employed to make exercises in well-established, mostly anachronistic idioms. This relates in particular to the artists working with traditional iconography, but could be seen also in the numerous variants of modernist paradigms. The attitude even percolated to what was considered contemporary imagery but what merely played with already familiar forms that are still considered novel or unusual.
Hesitant efforts
The six young painters from the local Kruthi art studio who showed together at the CKP (December 25 to 27), appear to be hesitantly trying to find a place between a vaguely modernist, formally-oriented grounding and a more contemporary language with thematic relevance. Manjunath H. Lakshman, C.S. Devraj and Manjunath H. partake primarily from the former source with unconvincing allusions to reality, the last artist being at least more cultered - subdued. Their figurative colleagues - Nirmala Kumari C.S., Satish Multhalli and Manjunath H.P. combine abstract areas with realistic ones oscillating between the symbolic obvious and the vague, sweetened or stylised.
Craftish nicety
Woodscapes - a collection of relief panels by Mumbai's Rajendra Chaudhari was displayed at the jewellery store Kirtilals (December 12 to 22). Although proving much patient labour and dexterity with the medium, the works turned out to be aiming at an easy pleasantness. They balance the physicality effect of the material, its natural tactility, hues, grains and cracks with abstract forms and surfaces, with suggestions of figures or falling leaves, a number of decorative elements using beads, strings, painted motifs and a number of smaller forms of wood frequently added to the whole. Despite the titles referring to essential or sublime states of mind and processes the effect touched only the surface; not rarely coming close to cuteness.
