Abstracted landscape
Crimson is currently showing the work of Gazala, a mid-generation fashion designer turned painter from New York (The Hatworks Boulevard, October 3 to 24). With some fairly conventional still-life compositions in a colourist, realistic mode and a number of stylised feminine silhouettes, the paintings focus on abstracted sceneries with urban sights against vast greenery and sun-saturated atmosphere. The self-taught artist's inspirations are evidently dated Modernist with echoes of still earlier sources coming through. Rather simplistically, she relies on the decorative effect of thick and not too nuanced texturing along with a pattern-oriented composition. Even the abstracting ingredient does not lighten it towards a potential of expressiveness because of its being reigned in the pronounced and repetitive design. The colours keep up the tone. Often bright and strong, they do not however interact except coinciding on the surface.
Hardly contemporary
"Vismaya", the exhibition of Goan art by the Mahua gallery which just concluded at Leela Galleria, The Leela Palace, was supposed to create wonder at the region's awakening to contemporary modes. The only name familiar on this horizon was Theodore Mesquita's with an interesting but somewhat mannerist imagery.
Apurva Kulkarni and Rajeshree Thakker contributed cultured, if not entirely original, drawings and paintings. The rest of the numerous display contained mediocre or lesser still paintings and drawings that oscillated between second-hand, indigenised modernist ways and a very vague contemporariness. Among instances of mere pleasantness, mannered cuteness, surface-bound spiritual symbolism, sketchy impressiveness, ethnic stylisation and ugly-pretty expressionism, there prevailed a temptation towards decorative designing, Vitesh Naik, Hitesh Pankar and Rajendra Usapkar perhaps deserving some consideration.
Stylised formula
Paramesh D Jolad, a painter from interior Karnataka showing at Lakshana (September 30 to October 19), offers a cycle of bull images on canvas. Intended as an evocation of the mighty animal's vitality, prowess and dynamic energy, they nevertheless come through as formulaic repetitions of one rather conventional take. Although one cannot deny the artist his fair technical skills, the angular contour shapes have an illustrative obviousness and quickness, while their Modernism-influenced but diluted combination of the recognisable with the abstracted is an utter déjà vu. Against the black and white monochrome, the single red spot of the bull's testicles seems somewhat comical.
Conventional
The current recent by K.N. Ramachandran (CKP, October 5 to 11) made one realise that from the earlier touching, if rather naïve, sincerity of direct description of rustic environs, the artist is becoming increasingly commercial, even though his skills have improved somewhat. He still portrays village people engaged in their activities or resting at home, but incorporates more easily indulgent themes, like pleasant-imposing deities and, above all, richly bedecked, innocently voluptuous ladies that are posed in somewhat voyeuristically. His rough, literal realism of a dated, schoolish kind has given way to glittering detail amid misty radiance that recalls the already facile idiom of Prithvi Soni.
