Passionate    abstraction
The recent exhibition of M Pradeep came after a gap of many years spent without painting. There is something authentic and touching in the way the artist now deals with what he absorbed early in his life and where he may be headed to. The often large acrylics on canvas and paper appear like abstractions, but only to reveal sensations of his presence in landscape as an intensely attuned participant almost merged with what he is looking at. Their form must have grown from the post-Royal College experiences of Sheela Gowda and B V Suresh which they shared with Ken School students in the late 1980s.
Pradeep still retains the kind of brushing of colour field flow that holds, rather than depicts, shapes together with the artist’s feeling gesture.
Referring social, personal situations or narratives, he immerses himself in the sheer visual and emotive tactility of pigments containing his intuitions about nature and being in it. The images blend fine, aware technical skills with a certain dose of innocence.
The motifs in his abstract sceneries hover on the verge of dualities. In a naïve manner, they seem to merge together. Volumes may be massive and static only to flatten, turn translucent and soar or hesitantly pulsate.
Forms are at the same time compact and spilling out. Space and distance may be underscored by shadows, dark as well as negative-light contoursbut they also enigmatically exchange their properties and hover and impose on one another. Pradeep needn’t introduce recognisable figures in order to let the spectator sense a keen human presence.
Whilst one could think of abstraction being not sufficient against the evident now weight of the human condition, the canvas “Nostalgia” points perhaps to a new direction that acknowledges this factor. The work introducing realistic shapes directly evocative of the latter is, actually, the best among the lot, making one expect more from the painter in the future.
Pleasing
Another new face here, the young Arun Suryavanshi, who moved to the city from Maharashtra and Kerala, displayed his work at the (CKP (May 27 to 31). His vast oils present the sort of consummate workmanship background that is familiar in Mumbai art education and where dexterous realistic rendering combines with a high degree of fluently handled abstraction, or stretches of actual vistas.
Suryavanshi appears to be equally professional in the somewhat predictable imagery as he is calculating enough to imbue a lofty subject with a somewhat easy, pleasing form that comes close to the decorative.
His exhibition “Rivers-1” was dedicated to honouring the beauty of Indian rivers, aiming also at reconciliation against the current Cauvery conflict. If one can empathise with the intentions, they did not really come through because of the literal way of presenting the same.
The compositions have realistic figures of town and village people, dark, detailed portraits of temple icons and animal friezes horizontally alternating with illuminated water. The calm rhythm of its golden, hazy spread dictates the behaviour of the other elements, yet edges towards the nicely, perhaps indulgently, decorative.
Modernist
Veeranna Sonar, a young art teacher from Chitguppa in Bidar district, may be to used to the practice in provincial educational institutions to be reaching for individual expression. His show at Lakshana (May 23 to 27) offered quite a number of painterly choices that spoke of a somewhat old-fashioned background and of the popular practice that allows random shifts among idioms. The exposition included lightly modernist renderings of ancient murals as well as landscapes, which when restrained proved interesting, also relatively realistic compositions with figures amid scenery and ones that either goaded the same towards a geometric simplification or a sketchy version.
Conventions
One wonders whether “The Speed” title of A A Swamy’s exhibition had to do with the velocity of the wind ruffling the clothes of the villagers in one of his canvases, in fact the sole comparatively absorbing one. The rest of the collection contained very stereotypical and more or less academic indigenous type images, “impressionistic” cock fights and sweeter dancers. The repertoire abounds in other over-familiar motifs supposed to be rooted, like women carrying earthen pots on their heads or bullocks, besides Mother Teresa. The sharp-detailed pencil portraits, were honest in a naïve manner.
Naïve
The “Pratiksha” show by J Kadur (CKP, May 25 to 27) was introduced by Alay, an organisation devoted to promoting rural artists. However, if the visitor expected authenticity or spontaneity, otherwise genuine depiction of village life and atmosphere, this did not happen. The paintings do present sights with women in pensive or playful moods, with children and in situations of domestic confinement.
Nevertheless, the style adopted by Kadur seems to have more to do with popular urban book illustrations or sweetened cartooning and with a simplistic, design-based composing than with rural realities.