Identifying with multiplicity
Art reviews
The exhibition by Anurendra Jegadeva at Sumukha (November 26 to December 15), organised with Kuala Lumpur’s Wei-Ling Gallery who represent him, was watched with interest and engagement, especially that the evocations and problems of multi-cultural identity in post-colonial circumstances against the current globalisation processes it brought revealed similarities and differences in the context here, those mainly adding to a more complex palimpsest of cultures and a greater role of the colonial inheritance.
The show’s title, “Strange Paradise Memories of Empire, the Gods and Mulligatawny Soup,” suggests the chaotically stratified character of the artist’s background as well as of his works. A Malaysian artist and writer of Indian ancestry, who studied and partly lived in the West, Jegadeva is a citizen of his immediate, middle-class, urban Malaysia and the world, for whom traces of earlier and recent history remain as tangible as the entrenched vestiges of ancient religious systems and familial or autobiographical inputs, while the treasure trove of childhood heroes mingles with a signage from the present, the latter gathering personal elements on a par with motifs from popular culture, commerce and politics.
Throughout, there is a feel of loose and shifting, yet ingrained togetherness of things and sensations along with superimposition and tentative merger of diverse eras, ethnicities and conventions, all this underscored by the intuition, occasionally a symbol (planes and stamps mostly, also an old-fashioned steamer), of changing places and travelling. The artist is primarily a painter, although one who with a free, almost brutal, warm nonetheless, realism captures familiar human types and objects or creatures and mixes them up with book pages and illustrations, lettering, photographic or painted reproductions from newspapers, banknotes, advertising logos, decorative fragments, etc.
Considered together with the quite literary titles, the images on paper, which are often boxed in transparent sheets or mounted in somewhat architectural, old-fashioned frames, are replete with puns as well as with straight, evident meaning. The impact thus oscillates between directness, raw or sensitive, and sincere naivety or innocence, ironic challenging or unquestioned wisdom and appreciative exuberance. Even if Jegadeva admits racial issues in the past, the simple-hearted appropriation of colonial paradigms by the native, like in the portrait of his mother as queen Victoria, the hypocritical kindness of American belligerence and the anachronism of a literal sort of Hinduism incorporated in the mortally imperfect priests for whom the world is standing still, he seems more amused and accepting than condemning.
He relishes putting a crow on the head of the Rahu priest and depicting a classical Hindu goddess statue through the filter of contemporary devotional pictures, while inserting children’s comic strip characters, Islamic calligraphy, Chinese motifs and Christian icons here and there with pure delight. One may notice a tinge of sadness perhaps, still this whole of confusing but grounded multiplicity eventually exudes a calmly vivacious enjoyment, rather like in the instances of intimate family portraits, tenderness being visible in the face of the painter’s wife despite its having been transposed into a postal stamp. An optimistic mood can be grasped all over the images where realistic figures, scattered signs and intricate ornaments become splashed by bright colour accents and fluid dots that drip down abundantly. This apparent disturbance, however, like in life, helps the layered entirety hold in unity and energy.
The micro in the macro
Anjali Srinivasan (Apparao Galleries, November 20 to December 30), speaks about inspiration for her sculptures in finely crafted blown glass from convex mirror shards filling the sheesh mahal that reflect and illuminate and as multiplied individual pieces draw the spectator into the objects.
This effect indeed can be indirectly intuited in the wearable costume of a scale and skin-like flexibility and in the vertical panel conjuring a muted, more merged, low relief which lets one think of some greater, organic and spatial matter processing on an intimate and universal scale. This continues in the large installations-sculptures of golden orbs arranged so as to suggest architecture, vast bodies and expanses as well as things close, intimate and beautiful. Valid but maybe over-stressed, the decorative trait acquires a calm, minimalist finesse in the horizontal waves of transparent stripes touched with colour to evoke a rudimentary rhythm of varied repetition becoming whole.
Basic, subtle energies, inseparable from their physicality and visuality in muted hue differentiations or pared down further to a delicately textured white paper can be appreciated in the wall reliefs which again rely on nuanced multiplications. Elsewhere, in the three-dimensional installation which induces one to look into its depth and in the framed reliefs, the artist explores slightly more obviously, the connection between the sensitive individual presence and cosmic structures, directions and movements.
