ART
Changing canvas
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`The text as structured by the author is as clinical as the artist he probes.'
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Life at its rawest: `Riot' by Sudhir Patwardhan.
WITHIN the context of modern Indian art, especially the post-Indian-liberal-global scenario, there has been an upsurge in the publication of artists' monographs, opening up their world, their struggles, their ideology and development of techniques to a discerning audience.
Painter of urban life
Ranjit Hoskote's book The Complicit Observer on Sudhir Patwardhan, a Mumbai-based artist, reflects, retrospects, analyses and comments on the nature of the artist's approach to his works. The textual part of the book breaks roughly into four zones. A Foreword by Geeta Mehra of Sakshi Gallery, followed by Hoskote's holistic approach in characterising and categorising the persona of Sudhir Patwardhan as a "complicit observer" of urban life, while simultaneously encapsulating him in the role of an artist, philosopher and activist, "The Statements by the Artist", his detailed Curriculum Vitae and the List of Plates. Patwardhan is aptly summed up by Geeta Mehra when she states, "he is a painter of urban life of Mumbai. It is life at its rawest, yet in his painting, its inhabitants retain their character, vitality and dignity... his morning medical practice distils into the afternoon studio painting". "The Statement by the Artist" augers well, in reinforcing, clarifying and providing a perspective of the artist's viewpoint and his understanding of life around as interpreted and expressed visually through the medium of art. The List of Plates provides logistics of the visuals for future scholarly/ academic pursuits.
Penetrating vision
The text as structured by the author is as clinical as the artist he probes, aptly defined by Hoskote: "Patwardhan the painter operates with the same penetrating vision as Patwardhan the radiologist". The layered meanings implicit within the paintings has been analysed perceptively, opening up the space to give the viewer a knowledgeable insight into the works of the artist, making possible an interactive dialogue between the painting and the viewer. The author's post-modern approach is explicated through contextualisation of the works within the culture, particularly the social reality of the artist's protagonists, which clearly underpins the social class and their ambient world.
Hoskote leads the reader through the different stages of Patwardhan's works, beginning from the mid-1970s to the present. Based on this classification, the body of works produced has been divided according to the decades, from 1975-1985, 1986-1996, 1997-2004. In addition there is also a representation of terracotta's and drawings as an integral part of his artistic oeuvre.
In the early 1970s the artist shifted to Bombay from Pune and the works produced during this period are indicative of the social class, particularly the proletariat. According to Hoskote, "Patwardhan has crafted a sequence of stylized portraits of labourers and tableaux of common people in moments of crisis.... he has never simply reproduced the body from the life, but has always subtly cast as machine for survival". His "Irani restaurant", "Green Truck", "The City" and "Street Play" are noteworthy from this period.
In the mid-1980s, according to Hoskote, "Patwardhan's focus changed from `speaking for people' to treating landscape as structured environment". The psychological crisis suffered by the artist during this period is chronicled through a variety of works that include the "Flood Series", the demolition of Babri Masjid, the riots that swept across the city and the environment degradation caused by the industries of the urban belt of Ambarnath and Ulhasnagar.
His paintings of the late-1990s constituted, according to Patwardhan, "an attempted movement towards a transparency of soul...I have struggled with the problem of elevating the particular to some larger sense of being `human'." The works of this phase are pictorially investigated through autobiographical mode, a self-reflexive act increasingly marking the artist's sensitive, empathic and insightful participation within his ambient reality. So much so, his figures have lost their identity in his canvases, transcending to take on epiphanic dimensions.
Dense reading
The author unnecessarily meanders in decoding the artist's paintings. The book makes for dense reading with the abounding verboseness of the author in his embalmed language, making it time-consuming to unfold the meanings, detracting from the crux — in enjoying simply the meaning and understanding the artist's works. Another drawback with Hoskote's analysis is the unnecessary referencing of Western artists in art history. A case in point is a particular painting titled "Construction Worker Washing her Face", in which, according to Hoskote, "her red head cloth, with its subtle highlights, is as elegant as a turban worn by one of Vermeer's discreetly fashionable woman".
The book is attractively formatted though a larger point size would have offered comfortable reading. It carries 112 colour plates and 27 black and white plates.
ASHRAFI S. BHAGAT
Sudhir Patwardhan: The Complicit Observer, Ranjit Hoskote, Sakshi Gallery, Synergy Art Foundation Ltd., Eminence Designs Pvt., Ltd., 2004, p. 206, price not stated.
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