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Layered condition

Last Updated 03 March 2013, 17:39 IST



It has already been for some time that one appreciates the efforts of Gallery Five Forty Five which, although not yet having a space fully suitable to display contemporary art, has been doing its best to project perhaps not the most spectacular nevertheless genuine and decent-quality work sourced especially, but not only, from younger artists’ studios.

This way, it fills the otherwise uncomfortable gap between the few leading art institutions, along with the not quite accessible to outside audiences artists’ initiatives, and the facile commercial fare of most small galleries.

The current exhibition there – “Photo Synthesis” (February 15 to March 5) curated by Lina Vincent Sunish, through its modestly restricted yet sincere, topical and fairly accomplished character, indeed reflects the spirit of the place.

It also reflects and contributes to its improvement, since in comparison to her previous show it remains at the same time visually, technically and thematically varied as well as cogent, while relating to important aspects of our reality today.

The premise of the exhibition relies on the three budding artists’ individually diverse uses of digital photography in combination with effects and involvement of other media. As the curator explains, the techniques allow for the processes of layering, fragmenting and building upon an existing image, whilst a camera picture handled further lets the factual or the external be permeated by sensation, imagination and interpretation.

One may add that the photographic element, which anyway is taken not in its straight look but in subtler and more complex manifestations, being part of contemporary sensibilities and urban circumstances, helps the viewer read and internalise the artists’ personal moods, ideas and reference contexts, besides making it possible to directly collage as well as with nuances superimpose and blend as well as formally transpose a diversity of shapes, planes, hues, textures, luminosities and shadows.

The curator stresses too the deep-down common, if not always evident, coexistence of the microcosmic and the macro and the nature of synthesis-anchored images, technical methods, artistic processes and thoughts.

The most lucid camera rooting is found in the work of Manju Mohanadas who partly stratifies and partly merges or mutually transforms intimate palm close-ups and expansive landscapes, the atmospheric light-shadow of both together with negative-qualities mediating the in-between state, while the insertion of graphic details in red, from threads that connect and restrict to stitched trajectories and geographical mappings, suggests a fluid and not yet resolved condition of belonging to different places, spaces and times, a muted sort of intimacy spreading over a cool vastness.

For Manush C J, the central to him is human figure or face, positioned so as to enable a feel of the presence, bears traces of the compelling power within photographic concreteness, as the artist manoeuvres the digital technique to virtually paint bodies that simultaneously hint at oils on canvas, sculptures and aquarelle-like colour translucency. Very good when sensitively rough and rudimentary, his shapes dilute under a profusion of layered textures and tonalities.

Pratibha Nambiar conjures in her words ‘ordinary amplified objects’ whose commonplace, inert status becomes animated and nearly personified with a playful sort of warmth under which the spectator may intuit some of the artist’s sentient mind.

Bridging, hybridising and confusing the appearance of seeds, vegetal shells, pomegranate fruits and flowers, she evokes auras of things intimately proximate as though suspended in a premonition of immensity. One would like to recommend to the gallery to separately print commentaries rather than hang text cards next to works, since that increases the crowding of the limited and already disturbing space.

Pleasant conventions

The large show on view at Kynkyny (February 22 to March 11) ambitiously claims to present “The New Romantics” who in a variety of contemporary ways grasp situations and moods of love.

What it does actually, however, is within the theme bring together many different names and personal styles whose impact nonetheless hardly differs because a great majority of the participants suit the popular, comfortably superficial, if not ingratiating, expectations from the subject dressed in a number of rather conventional aesthetic idioms. Lover couples in proximity, atmospheric single figures in mood-enhancing nature and mother and child images evidently prevail.

Those introduce a hardly differentiated gamut of sweetly stylised versions and straight demonstrations, those either remaining within old-fashioned formal paradigms with a decorative tendency which is sometimes made seem more contemporary merely on the surface, or acquiring mannered classical art qualities alluding to wall painting or to grand statuaries, otherwise combining such traits with a strong caricature accent, as a dated realistic approach contrasts with abstract symbolism and sporadic truly contemporary expressions, the latter seen especially in Amrita Dhawan.

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(Published 03 March 2013, 17:38 IST)

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