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A boundary is not that which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. (-Martin Heidegger, Building, dwelling, thinking).
It is the trope of our times to locate the question of culture in the realm of the beyond. We are less exercised by annihilation- the death of the author- or epiphany- the birth of the 'subject'. Our existence and the present exhibition today is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of the present, for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix 'post': postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism.
The beyond is neither a new horizon nor a leaving behind of the past.(Beginnings and endings may be the sustaining myths of the middle years; but at present we find ourselves in the moment of transit where space and time cross to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. A staging of otherness and alteration constitutes these 28 works creating this body of visual text seized with mirth, resemblance and desire First the confrontational and the heroic- outsider to the mainstream and its institutions who upheld a subversive revolutionary identity, and the second that verge on the solipsistic guise, whose reclusive symptoms manifest often through a disquieting expressionism by using the premises of abstractionist formalism. The complex entanglements of cultural currents that emerged with present concerns in postcolonial studies can only be presented adequately in exhibitions like these and thus become an experience. If Historicism - and even the modern, European idea of history came to non- European people in the nineteenth century or somebody's way of saying "not yet" to somebody else. If former simple presentation models are abandoned and the dialogues between cultures as open process, the exhibition space transforms into a site of 'contemporary gaze'. The present site provokes a dialogue that will not question our own notion of culture and society but will also affect how we imagine ourselves. Thus signals out how an eclectic range of imagery from the changing world of postcolonial India became instrumental in evolving a visual language of collage and citation, which in turn, acted as a vehicle of cultural force, creating and negotiating as the sacred, the erotic, the political, the modern and beyond. The very idea of historicizing which carried with it some peculiarly European assumptions of disenchanted space, secular time and human sovereignty now challenges the notion of our presence in the waiting rooms of metanarratives.
The exhibition space act as site where these seven emerging artistes work out their destiny, the right to signify, human experience the "wholeness' of existence for to exist to dispense with utilitarian projects and engage the violent dynamic that has no other object than the return to a lost totality. Such encounters open the interior experience of wholeness and belong to the realm of the sacred and erotic. Their truth is known only because of a set of accidents. There is no more reality that meets the eye, and then listens to what is produced in addition to exchange identifiable in the dialogue to keep the record of these invisible events. This exhibition keeps the record of such events, nearly effaced, self-effacing, but altogether real, a breaking or a wounding on the subject of breaking and wounding inscribed into the very body of this faithfully produced space-this exhibition that gives birth to this dialogue, a genre that shows unmistakable colours as the question of interpretation of an encounter.
The group show comprising works by Anasuya Chakraborty, Avijit Mukherjee, Sanjoy Bose, Santanu Mitra, Tanmoy Biswas, Timir Brahma, Kayas Saha - a representative fraction of a region, which has contributed enormously in the making of our contemporary visual text. What is also important for us that works in this show need to be seen in the context of its current concerns, practices and expectations provide a sort of crucible of the art of the moment. Works that are self referential, steeped in personal vision that is intimate and preoccupied with explorations of form, space and myth. Viewings that result not in familiarity but fresh discoveries. One suspects nevertheless that a passion still burns within these artists, even if its flame is kept under strict cerebral restraint. For some, however, the fire roars at the edge of control and it is turbulent as life itself.
Anasuya Chakraborty's (b.1974) acrylic on canvas is riveting. Only in the dissolution of the subject do we know that consciousness is the ecstatic discovery of human destiny. Not an originator or proprietor, but a fissure, an opening where you would like to grasp your timeless substance, encounter only a slipping, only the poorly coordinated play of your perishable elements. |
It is associated with living, living more ascertaining to life upto the point of death than act. In these entire works, one can see eroticism as means of revolt, not an exercise of power but a tumultuous upheaval of limitation which may be called 'sovereignty'. They depict a meaningless loss-transcending the development of means - an escape in her antiquated world. However, escape is toward the impossible world whose extreme limit assumes laughter, irony, ecstasy, terrified approach towards the end.
In Avijit Mukherjee's watercolours (b.1969), entropy is not the reigning spectre; instead, they are pervaded by lightness, exhilaration. In spite of his enormous erudition and sense of form, he puts them together with a calm detachment in which a clear structure combines intimately with eroticism and expressiveness to achieve a paradoxical visual image to create scenes of artifice and makes him one those rare painters. But these artifices do not by any means resist our emotional identification or intellectual response. Celebrated by his contemporaries for his formal rigour and invention, and his language provide unending possibilities for learned exegesis and decoding of his gestural rhetoric. We see the large modulations and brilliant monochromatic fields obtained through difference of values spread before us, which does not consist not only of relations of warm and cool, of expansion and contraction, which vary in accordance with the colours considered. It also consists of regimes of colours, the relation s between these regimes, and the harmonies between tones.
In the recent works by Shantanu Mitra (b.1969), Sanjoy Bose (b.1970), or Tanmoy Biswas (b.1970), what is also important for us that works in this show needs to be seen in the context of its current concerns, practices and expectations provide a sort of crucible of the art of the moment. This exhibition addresses some of these artists. Their work is often linked to the painterly tradition of Abstract Expressionism with nuances of myth, transfiguration effervescent with our eclectics; it is at least painterly and mostly representational. In fact, what these paintings do is affirm the relative unimportance of historically- derived meaning in favour of a compelling physicality and emotional presence. They are distinguished by an absence of the moat of theory surrounding much contemporary and conceptual art. Mitra who according to the experience of all times, always says "I", recites to us the entire dramatic scale of his passions and appetites, and breathe it.
Bose's application of the paint across the surface of the canvas reinforces, or counterpoints, the rhythms set up by the distribution of figures and the grouping dark and light masses. One relates to narrative elements and still enjoys the paintings as brilliant compositions. In these new works, Biswas coaxes frenzy, for example, and drama from the strokes of the brush, marking exquisite somber passages of colour. He is no longer the recluse painter but a theatre director carrying with him the concept of the whole thing. The theatrical, dramatic use of the light in these works emphasizes a narrative, and the abstract chiaroscuro of luminosity and darkness modeling from across the canvas, but there is also a use of light-accents to pick out sequences of movement.
In Timir Brahma's (1977) work time -space-periods, pop remainders float through his works in abandon with a fluidity assuming now one form ,now another illuminating areas as vivid streaks of lighting descending into a light drizzle, a kind of lunar aesthetics grow on the viewer as our own contemporary experience abides in another pictorial space and time.
The works of Kayas Saha (b.1965) have a stream of consciousness quality in them, as if the outside world had been brought indoors and painted from multiple memories. Memory proves crucial to him and enables him to function at all during periods of anxiety, torment and pensiveness when it is not goaded into services by devices or activities designed for a purpose. His readings and contemplations must surely here found into his works surreptitiously. Works are never cataclysmic and for the most part there is predictability and containment in the form of his core images held within carefully balanced compositions expressing a transcendental emotivity, a struggle so grand and precious, that makes the soul tremble before the pulsating drama, that is ideas, arise from darkness.
The paintings on display here overflow the edge and confront our borders of geographical construct which is in closed walls of our mind. We ask where is the porosity of such limits, the uncertainty of sharing, and the fragility of resolutions. Between where at one's stake is reaching the limits, playing with them, Estateablishing passages.
Nanak Ganguly.
January, 2008. |
