Art reviews
Traffic Masala
It must be natural that foreign artists coming to work here respond to the urban traffic whose chaotic, open and often irritating intensity allows for an immediate contact with life while manifesting specific patterns of as well as reasons for its behaviour.
In particular, auto-rickshaws they need to use, apart from their sheer exoticism, trigger an interest in the men driving them, their spirit, hardships and aspirations. At a time when art tries not only to directly enter or parallel real life but also to engage with its own creative ways, some artists, including local ones, involve people from around the auto-world in their work.
Christian Engelmann, a German resident at 1Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery, displayed the results of such interaction there (February 2 to 5). Considered the main piece of the “Traffic Masala” exhibition, the so titled video documented and evoked the story and mood of his project aimed at constructing a mechanised bullock cart. Rather than being a finished exhibit even as a film, it suggested that the experience and shaping out of his idea together with members of the low-brow Ideal Gas Welding shop was the actual art work.
The focus on the doing brought about a sense of the existential rhythm, all the more so that instead of aesthetising the whole, the camera just captured the persons, raw substances and simple actions. In response to the bewildering and sometimes disturbing simultaneity of modern high-tech and ancient, physically embedded phenomena, to the unwrapped co-presence of cars, humans and animals on the city roads, Engelmann perhaps desired to relieve the magnificent beast of its burden.
The concept seems to have been dictated as much by ironic absurdity as by empathy and perceptiveness about the apparently incongruous, shabby and harsh things at the grass roots plane here that nonetheless yield ingenuous hybrids of necessity recycling and re-moulding scraps of technology and humble materials. And so, having introduced the men of the workshop, the video showed them and the artist assembling massive metal angles, motors, cables and wooden bars topped by a touchingly thin, two-dimensional, realistic oxen head, finally the automated cart having to be steered by men through the density of the nocturnal street.
The mischievous project and the respectful warmth towards the archaic animal and the people of manual skills may have contained some warning with regard to the rapidity of technological progress. On display in the gallery, was a sculpturally re-structured version of the mechanical bullock cart, quite effective on its own.
By comparison, the rest of the exhibits convinced more as gestures or markings of thoughts than independent art works, which probably reflected the intention behind them.
The “stamp drawings” conjured images of linear sequences of imprints from the same carving that depicted and auto-rickshaw with a driver. Picking up on the omnipresence of rubber stamps in the dry, bureaucratic blue and various other moulds, the repetition of the module accentuated the recurrent pulse of vehicular crowding, its stressful confusion somehow falling into the fluid logic of constantly changing, risky negotiation.
Besides a large auto threaded of little auto motifs, the smaller prints visualised masses of these vehicles spiralling, meandering and converging into a near clash potent with a possibility of escape, even conjuring ritual symbols of auspiciousness, while even the national flag appeared to give in to the rough throb of the city in endless motion.
Rough elegance
“The Muse”, Akash Choyal’s exhibition at Crimson (December 13 to January 7), had an ample number of relief works which the young artist from Udaipur calls “trio-graphs” or 3D paintings. The fancy-sounding technical terms indeed reciprocate the focus given by him to formal effects which one tends to associate with formalism rather than with the properties of form needed for particular expression. Choyal strives to create a strong impact of different dimensions that interact by contrast as well as connection.
His medium-size panels are made of fibre-glass, the fairly thick bases having been silhouetted into irregular bulges and depressions, as many fully and partly plastic motifs of soft, otherwise hard-edge, geometry and figural images rise from the surface slowly or jut out almost detaching themselves and throwing shadows, while the main plane and most separate volumes are covered by flat drawings proper. The milky smoothness of the material and its occasional translucency emphasises the indulgent slickness of the shapes.
That can be said also as much about the essentialist realistic figures as about the near-expressionistically distorted ones, the latter appearing cute despite the evident intent of capturing lofty inspirations, feminine grace and moods of coarse but innocent and playful childhood. Comparatively better are the somewhat restrained, realism and geometry-dictated pieces, like “A Ramble”.
