Child-like in a metaphoric landscape

Dance footloose on the earth’ was an installation of sculptures by British artist Barbara Ash (1, Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery from December 2 to 6) which were the result of her residency in Bangalore. Quoting from Horace, she refers to the European tradition of nature more as assertive of pleasure against the awareness of death.

This allusion, especially in the Indian context, may not have been clear without some explaining. The meaning underlying it, nevertheless, did come through very well in the imagery of a fabulous-real landscape that evoked moods around things almost literal yet metaphoric. The artist bases here on the archaic but there’s always topical use of animal figures and ordinary objects as standing for human character, values and situations. Drawing from popular culture here, she has the ample contemporary lineage behind her beginning with Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley, but shapes her way quite individually.

More than that, she relates to the atmosphere of old fairy-tales and the kind of children’s stories in which adults rediscover child-like sharpness, truthfulness and innocence as well as gravity. As such, her work can be understood in any culture. The element of naivety in Barbara’s aesthetic belongs to toys, simple utilitarian things or decorations and a dose of kitsch. The humour in it oscillates between irony, sadness and warm lyricism, while rough finish complements playful lightness.What one liked was that the show, threaded of many images and ideas-suggestions, made an immediate impact as a inconspicuously tight, expressive whole. An important layer there was the sculptor’s contrasting and reconciling of Western and Indian perceptions, issues, values and sensations. Both comparing and absorbing could be wonderfully felt at the same time, refreshingly considering that foreign artists often resort to obvious quotations from and statements on local reality.

And so, framed by pink hillocks and vast flowers, the scenery had a huge bunny rabbit of painted thermacol in a magisterial chain recalling a tinsel garland. This figure of hierarchical authority oversaw a jolly vacuum cleaner that stirred softly as if an organic creature and faced a toy-human ‘Decorative Elephant Shrew’, thus modern and ancient, mechanical and natural, Occidental and Indian qualities interchanging. On rangolis of pink powder that resembled flowers drawn by a child, there raced miniature cars with a white man living his ‘Western Dream’ and turtles of ‘Development’, interspersed by blue, pan-organic foetuses marked by skulls. Barbara, employing mundane materials, retains some of their coarseness or anonymous smoothness, but simultaneously endows them with a sensuous tactility that carries traces of the fingers that moulded them. This, together with the colourfulness of the forms, contains her response to the bright, corporeal vivacity that this country is and where many things are still hand-made and still bonded to nature.

Variants of popular styles

TThe four mid-generation painters from West Bengal who exhibited together at the CKP (December 16 to 23), may be equipped with quite consummate technical skills, but those serve them to provide the spectator with relatively cultured but self-limited variants of familiar and already anachronistic idioms. Biraj Kumar Paul has rather literal realistic still-lifes and sculptural heads whose predictability comes close to stiffness. Tarun Chakraborty’s divine figures push that option further to stylised cuteness otherwise to obviousness when depicting mortals. The supposedly contemporary use of painted stitches remains an empty, formalist device. Malay Chandan Saha is an abstractionist heavily dependent on High Modernism with his decoratively energetic gestural strokes.

The hazier, diffused abstracts of Anup Karar aim at evoking landscape moods and human presence, however, only touch the vaguely pleasant surface of it all. Three kinds of the decorative

The trio of Tamil Nadu artists at the CKP that followed the Bengali group (December 24 to 28), proved to be fairly similar in their aesthetic sources and in the intention to reach nice but indifferent effects. Once again, this resulted in abstract compositions dominating. It also resulted in the fact that the two abstract painters proper - Ravi Dhanapal and S Bhavani Shankar could hardly be differentiated. Their frequently large canvases formatted as diptychs or poliptychs, whether structured around loose grids or less pronounced, multiple diagonals, played with an akin sort and number of means, like broad, abbreviated strokes and strong colours blended with misty illumination. K G Narendra Babu may be partial to dense figuration with a folkloristic base, still he handles it so as to turn the motifs into a decorative, lace-like indulgence.

Dated gamut

Yet another ensemble, the Saptavarna artists hailing from smaller places in Andhra Pradesh, brought a yet more numerous range of excessively known idioms.
Without being loud perhaps, they are outdated despite the efforts to at least lighten the form or make it sketchy. Taara Nagesh paints simplified, bright images of deities, while Korasala Sita Rama Swamy imposes on them both abstraction and mannerist contours. N S Sarma and S V Rama Sastry diffuse simplified ethnic figuration with a stress on texturing. Abstract Expressionism and a Modernist sculptural vocabulary lie behind Uday Kumar Marlapudi's work and that of T V Rao’s. Kocheria Venkateswara Rao tries to introduce relatively fresh elements ending, however, in a purely formal play.

Geometrised design

Hareendran Chalad, a painter from Kerala with some 30 years of experience in the field has sincere concerns about the cruelties of current wars and the entrapment that urban life has become. He also wishes to capture the tensions in a commercially driven individual. All this, however, is either stated in a literal way or becomes obfuscated under a profusion of symbolic but unclear shapes.
Alluding to the architectural framework of cities, he builds his canvases of regular and too repetitive grids that rely on the simple geometry of horizontals, verticals and diagonals.
Both the figures and abstract motifs housed-withheld in them are far too stylised in a vague manner to become evocative.