From the radical to sheer maya
GAYATRI SINHA
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While Sunil Gawde has made a radical shift in his art practice with his exhibition Blind Bulb, etc. at the Visual Art Gallery in the Capital, Samarendra Raj Singh's paintings at Shridharani Gallery combine abstract with the natural.
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A SHIFT INDEED Some of the works of artist Sunil Gawde on display in New Delhi.
The moving object appears like a huge phallic earthworm, precariously poised on a glass-topped pedestal. With intense majesty it raises itself, only to deflate, and then again attempt the rising. Through several repetitions, the object is rendered both droll and cynical, its unnerving flesh-like appearance unsettling the easy reading of the work.
Sunil Gawde has made a radical 180 degree shift in his art practice, moving from meticulously executed paintings with a sensuous appreciation for pigment and colour to sculptural installations.
His exhibition titled `Blind Bulb etc' (Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai) has transformed the Visual Art Gallery into a charged space with select pools of lighting that dramatically present his mechanically driven sculptures. The meticulous attention to detail, and the subtle shifts in register that one can expect from Gawde distinguish this exhibition. The worm's cycle of aspiration and failure in fact sets the tone for the idea of universal efficacy and limitation.
On the conceptual plane, however, the central concern in the exhibition is around the perceptual field, personified by three bulbs so large that you could hug them.
One of them presents a continuously jangling damaged filament, the second is rendered carbonated and opaque, its black matt finish like the night that the bulb seeks to defy, the third presents a goggle eye that stares back at the viewer.
This metaphor of sight/seeing/perception is repeated in a large swinging pendulum that reflects the viewer's gaze, which is in turn, distracted by the mechanised worm at the rim of the pendulum, that moves with manic precision in an anti-clockwise direction.
Metallic butterfly
The single object that plays on the added dimension of sound is a large metallic butterfly that employs a dagger from a Chinese decorative object at its centre. Animated by the approach of the viewers' footsteps, its deadly blades' infested wings start to whir and move with repressed energies.
Clearly, what is happening here is a complete dislocation of scale and associations.
In blowing up the bulb to a life-size glass object, Gawde confers it with tactility and a presence. Similarly, the transformation of the butterfly, the most evanescent of creatures is into a metallic object that does not fly, but bristles and braces its wings at the sound of approaching footsteps.
Gawde appears to be bound by the conceptual thread that binds together these pieces, as well as links them with his body of paintings. A product of the JJ School, (1980) Gawde was first drawn to what he describes as `ready-mades' in 1998. He used 19 such objects minimally transformed by the artist's intervention in the exhibition Oblique. His interest in ready-mades persisted; in fact, he draws upon recognition as a primary point of entry in his work. The viewer then has to contend with the dynamic expansion of scale, which reworks our reading of the everyday object.
Gawde's choice of subject/object, the butterfly, the bulb, the worm and the pendulum, the residue of the everyday then serve as signifiers of the passage of time, its relentless repetitions, and its inevitable extinctions. In his choice of materials, Gawde presents light and sound as evanescent materials that then stir up issues around substance and transcendence.
On an inverted scale, Gawde speaks of the puny scale of human existence engaging in a humour that is both wry and lavish.
Samarendra Raj Singh's exhibition Maya at Shridharani Gallery (till August 5) combines abstract and naturalistic elements to present works on the received and the imagined image.
The domination of the human form in the visual field through the media and the street, the conflation of secular and sacred iconographies, forms that seek to seduce and forewarn have received degrees of attention in Indian art.
Singh's paintings are densely peopled with the figures of everyday life, often set up in sharp contrast to iconic forms that invite mass following.
His work is most interesting where it is dominated by ambiguity, where the relationships between the characters remain only tentatively defined, much like the nature of maya itself.
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