Kaleidoscopic structuring of closeness

It is only natural, even desired, that foreign artists briefly working in India should focus on their experience of the country so unlike theirs. The most contributing results of such encounters, rather than literally quoting from the characteristic differences, capture some essential aspects of the reality here as felt and processed by a sensitive and responsive outsider. This, indeed, was one’s reflection on watching the display by Christine Mulberger which culminated her one month stay at the Bangalore Artists Residency (March 13 to 14). For the mid-generation Swiss artist walking in the midst of life is a regular method whose nature assures of direct contact.

 Everyday she walked from Vijayanagar to the City Market to look at the busy, colourful area and its inhabitants. Perhaps the sheer intensity of bodily and emotive human presence stimulated her to do long hours of sketching on the spot and interacting with people.

The multitude of small, mostly one-figure drawings in pen and ink on paper together pick up the sense of a dynamic crowd of simultaneities that arise from perceptively seen individuals - typically local as well as warmly, intimately received. The residual realism surfaces lightly at times, while a majority of the contour images grasp the core of the sight in an attuned, taut-relaxed short-hand that follows basic forms partly and partly abbreviates towards the almost abstract rudimentary or the nervously tender.

If the drawings offer insight into the embodied immediacy of Christine's impressions, the large work ‘The Kumkum Series’ frames, abstracts and intensifies the basis of her sensations in a manner that uses conscious, minimalist devices in order to reach the heart of the animated phenomenon as well as to mark her path to it.

A vast rectangle on the wall was shaped into a white-lined grid made from a mass of uniform photographic prints - fragmentary close-ups of bright ritual powders in the bazaar. Letting one think of the tradition of Sol Lewitt, the whole as though somewhat architecturally structures and frames a stirring, kaleidoscopic diversity of strong, mainly red hues.

The relative distance of the geometry appears to gather the separate shapes and their inner trajectories into a suggestion of tentative roundness which, nevertheless, continually shifts and dissipates. Each of the abstract-looking prints is like a fine, reductive abstract, but yields a warm, even exciting, feel of surface and colour texture over layered tonalities in slightly or sharply changing light and shadow. Thus, it generates recognition of things raw, very close and subtle that are viewed on the flat, however, contain seeds of their immersion in space and air.

Nostalgia and suffering

Paresh Hazra has always based on his childhood memory of rural Bengal in a rather cute way depicting the innocence of simple folk as carriers of tradition and values. His recent response to their suffering under political turmoil must be sincere, but it comes with the usual large dose of sentimentality and consummate techniques underscored by formal mannerism (Rightlines, March 1 to 13).

The charcoal drawings have the characteristic doll-like figures of dark, vast eyes shown in poses that can be read as tormented without being expressive of the same because of the overall curvaceous softness. The smoothly graded rubbings and the texturing in squiggly lines merely enhance the pattern-oriented decorativeness of the style.

The bigger paintings about deities and mythological scenes are perhaps an anchor against the pain, while aesthetically continuing the artist's vibrant but just pleasant idiom with its blend of bright colour and the tactile relief element of as if worn out egg tempera.

Mixed bag

The numerous exhibition by the final year students of the Ken School of Art (CKP, February 27 to 29) proved, on the one hand, that formalistically treated, dated conventions and half-hearted contemporariness still continue there, whereas on the other, some aspirants strive for authenticity and engagement. Among the latter one noticed Madhu Arya, Lokesh B.H. and Vijay P, maybe also Shwetha S and Satish Gowda.