Collapse of certainty

Galleryske, continuing its focus on bold, young art, presents Bangalore-born Sreshta Premnath who lives in New York. His exhibition, the "Black Box" (January 7 to February 15) from evidence of air crash becomes a metaphor of the current collapse of clarity in a globalising world. Human and object movements spontaneously change and muddle perception, positions and values, while deliberate manipulation of the same comes from economical powers and advertising imagery aided by technology.

Against such phenomena the artist enquires into the need to view things with understanding, to find identity within limitations and sheer impossibilities. Against the background of altering power equations he uncovers paths of forced ownership situations. One can admire Sreshta's serious engagement, knowledge and manifold sources, acknowledging that the complexity of the issues he deals with justify, even require perhaps, a conceptual approach. The artist wishes to flesh it out through visuality, which sometimes is successful but sometimes does not hold together. When it does, it creates a strong, striking impact which reveals much of the content with immediacy. This happens with "Contraband" - large aluminium trunks filled with soil in which tropical plants grow under powerful artificial illumination that in a cold climate makes up for original sunshine. Leafing through the accompanying documentation about colonial-time acclimatisation of European plants in India and about American corporations appropriating ageless ethnic resources in the name of gene patents, one can realise that Sreshta brings to our eyes the current robbing of ownership rights. The "Freedom of the Seas" digital prints made from photographic Internet sources refer to the artificial, self-sufficient world of pleasure conjured for the well off on a cruiser. Its experience includes ready-made sampling of ethnicities but ends in sinking.

This, in a series of banners with scribbled quotations and an image of a figure packed for voyage, is juxtaposed with the natural reality of individual travelling for authentic experience and with the harshness of illegal migrations from poor countries. To read the work correctly and feel it then one needs to know the artist's explanation beforehand. In "Phantom Moon", too, one has to learn first that the video projection with moving dots belongs to the photograph of the earth taken from the moon in the '60s. Its lack of clarity links with the fact that the moon formed once of fragments of the earth. Sreshta here plays on the elusiveness of seeing the whole and understanding it from its fragment, as he confronts the dots with the image of an immense whale, whilst the sound-track combines the story of a man who wanted to amputate his leg, an astronaut's memories, etc. Only having learned the references and having stayed with the installation long enough to realise the deceptiveness of the photographic surety that we are made to believe, its effect grows on the spectator, indeed, reasserting one's desire to see and understand things along with its doomed prospects.

Abstracting landscape

Pratima Sheth of Mumbai is an artist and art historian who has published an encyclopaedia of Indian artists. Having adopted a rather traditional approach in her volume, as an artist too she aligns herself with an established and perhaps over-familiar genre of abstracted landscape rooted in the heritage of High Modernism but carrying a need for literal connection in terms of realistic representation. Thus, her oils on canvas displayed at Rightlines (January 18 to February 1), quite like in the previous exhibition in the City, continue the oscillation between the clearly recognisable image with rows of trees or undulating scenery lines and the vibrantly otherwise smoothly textured abstract evocations of atmosphere and expanse. Since the former ingredient especially is given much to regularly repeated patches, the viewer prefers the more abstract paintings that hold minimal, largely linear traces of shapes.

Blurring motifs in space

Prasanna Kumar, a young painter from Bellary, seems to follow classic ways yet closer than his older predecessor. The cycle of water colours he showed recently at Lakshana (January 12 to 21) have their origin in academic conventions of long time ago. True, the artist does not rigidly detail his natural sceneries, instead retaining only a few shapes against the vast whiteness of the space around and behind them. He also depicts these boats on water, trees and rustic figures against the sky with an amount of lightness and a sketchy, somewhat drawing-like painterliness. The choice of images, their execution and composition, nevertheless, have been seen over and over again and belong to staple popular imagination. As such, they hardly convey the emotions Kumar wishes to endow them with.

Stylised variants

The rather grand title - "Eshona" or the wish, "Journey through Deepness" - of the exhibition on a group of Bengali artists (CKP, January 16 to 22) did not really generate the desired profundity. The seven painters: Abir Chaowdhury, Shyamal Dutta Banik, Jhumpa Das, Manik Kandar, Bharat Das, Rabindranath Das and Maloy Dey stay within the parameters of well-known and popularly appreciated easy idioms of a broader kind. Whether basing in ethnic stylisation, modernist simplifications, realistic portrayal or partly contemporised methods, they offer variant of the familiar, sporadically of an individual artist's style (Paresh Maity).

Even without loudness, in each case their aim appears to be vague pleasantness. The two sculptors: Anjana Kirtania and Soumen Pal, also indulge in consummate but merely nice exercises with restrained High Modernist and exuberant folklore-related form.

Folklore

Santosh Asramam, a young painter from Kerala, feels rooted in the folk tradition of his land, its rituals and art. His exhibition at the CKP (January 18 to 23) proved that but touching merely the surface of things. The human stories he depicts are dressed in a stylised manner that does make their sources evident however pushes their absorption or interpretation almost towards the mannerist and playfully cartoon-like.
The painter may be altering the rhythms and forms but those turn dangerously close to designing. The whole may be dynamic and bright, yet without acquiring true liveliness.