Visualising thought
How to outwit a mosquito’ at Galleryske (October 8 to November 11) is the second site-specific installation by Estee Oarsed or Swiss Christoph Storz's Indian alter ego. If the previous one dealt with similarities within intercultural differences while visually stimulating reflection, the current exhibition in a classic conceptual manner makes the viewer-reader a participant which is helped by the way the space is visually arranged.
In fact, there is a finely suggested correspondence between the diverse but permeable aspects of the cultural and social phenomena the artist introduces in his writing and the layered architectural recesses or superimposed -obfuscating as well as clarifying - plain rectangular plaques and sheets of text and other art pieces.
Storz addresses the issue of the currently dominating commercialism versus the genuineness of personal-universal values. On entering the gallery one faces an appeal to artists not to believe that the art market reflects the authentic art system. Its mock-analytical character is utterly serious, eventually lending the words a dose of lyricism, as the financial argument links with other issues of human concern.
Accents of visible poetry reverberate in the brief modern fairytale stories with a philosophical moral. The question of sincerity and involvement in art and in the viewer who then completes artwork is placed with a kind of obviousness, by making the spectator put his or her nose into a work, which eventually becomes optically and emotively allusive and introspective. Here, oscillating between words and images, the artist connects and displays the narrow but essential differences as well as dangerous permeability of honest judgement and steered one, of individuality and mob behaviour, all those impacting art appreciation, consumerism and politics.
In another series of works based on newspaper cuttings, media photographs and film imagery he delves into a host of problems generated and revealed by the beauty queen pageant and Amitabh Bachchan in Bangalore some years ago. The work which gave the show its title sums up and abstracts the issues of materialism and status ambitions bringing them to a quietly emotive pitch and confrontation with existential values. Framed above by a partially laid messy brown paint and the somewhat chaotic cudappa stone slabs on the floor, the wall bears milky rectangles with ambition-driven slogans and questions about sincerity. Between the flimsy writing and the stone solidity of disarray, the viewer can feel the weight of uncertainty. The calligraphy, like elsewhere, carefully recreates a rounded naivety with a tinge of sensitive tremor, thus evoking a possibility of both simplistic or crude and sincere striving.
Painter's nature
One knows Hariraam as a painter of abstract and highly abstracted compositions that sublimate our experience of urban and natural environs with a sense of spatial atmosphere impregnating architectural geometry. For the first time the artist is presenting images of his favourite hunting place - Bangalore's Lal Bagh. Realising the alien character of a possible realistic depiction, he rightly chooses to affirm his love for the park in photographs. The prints at Time & Space (October 25 to November 2) indeed mediate intimately relishing the directness of plants and park environs with a fairly traditional painterly viewing. As such, the images, not original perhaps but sensitive and cultured, are quite classic both in terms of photographic methods of composing and of art-related ones.
Throughout, Hariraam looks for inner rhythms of things received with personal tenderness. Thus, most of the shots are taken from fairly close on and focus on forms and pulses of a nuanced regularity. Somewhat wider scenes with a massive tree trunk and roots or with leaves above water link their structure and dynamism to the background. Close-ups of foliage masses, rows pots or bamboo stems bring out their tactility and less evident rhythms.
A sense of calm, pleasant solitude is enhanced in the shots of empty, old-fashioned benches and fragments of architecture or a single object that are positioned emphatically off centre. The extreme surface focus of the tree bark image approximates abstraction. Without including people, the photographs nonetheless evoke the artist's presence.
From Gulbarga
The four young painters, who showed together at the CKP this month, have a common educational background from Gulbarga. Some of them - Kalidas B. Sonar and Shashikant G. Patil - adhere to variants of the popular there formula of decoratively simplified and geometrised folklore stylisation that is expected to stand for authenticity.
The other pair - Govardhan K. and Mallikarjun S. Katke - prove much more sincerity in their efforts to express inner musing about being surrounded at present by nature and tradition and to touch on personal experience of contemporary existential predicament.
Even though partly giving in to design and texture, they retain a realistic bond with their world.
Formalism
The six third year art students of Bangalore University (CKP, October 19 to 24) seem to be taking an easy way out by either following dated, over-familiar conventions or merely playing with supposedly contemporary forms. Of the sculptors, Sunil Kumar B. does sinuous, modernistic compositions, while Krishnamurthy Char K.N. and Jagdish M. Jani piece together superficially unusual ones.
Among the painters, Madhu Sudan P. and Senthil Kumar J. stick to rather stylised rustic figuration, whereas Jino K. Kurian at least tries for a more genuine realistic depiction, although prettifies it slightly.
Rustic charm
Buwa Shete's exhibition at Gallery-g (October 5 to 12) brought another version of this popular favourite- pleasantly urbanised rusticity. Certainly well painted in technique terms, the often vast, bright canvases nevertheless were a mere indulgence in the co-mfortable vision of village humanity as innocent and gracefully sensuous. Whether evoking motherly tenderness or alluding to Krishna as flute-player, the images were equally sentimental.
Marta Jakimowicz
