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ART
Figuring the ground
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Iranna Rukumpur's ability to play with the symbolic possibilities of figuration is remarkable, says RANJIT HOSKOTE, reviewing his current series of paintings, shown recently in Bangalore.
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Iranna Rukumpur...
WITHIN the brief space of five years, Iranna Rukumpur has demonstrated a versatile ability to play with the symbolic possibilities of figuration. He has employed figuration to encrypt autobiography while relating intimate histories of self and place to larger dramas of political change; to weave a path through abstraction; to suggest the mythic templates that secretly define contemporary life. Far from exhausting these possibilities, the artist has moved into another phase of intensive engagement with the figure as bearer of value, on the evidence of his current series of paintings, shown recently by the Guild Art Gallery, Mumbai, at the Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore.
Iranna's key image, the naked and tonsured figure, fuses the yogi, the bhikshu, and the tirthankara, exemplars of transcendence drawn from three major sacred traditions within Indic culture. In more secular key, it encodes references to Gauguin, Bacon and Hockney, the Jorasanko masters, and the android martyr-saviours of science fiction. Such a plurality of sources is integral to Iranna's logic of figuration, which modulates the human figure in situations at once archetypal and political, suggestive of a deep archive of ceremonial physiology but also memorialising the present. In his current work, foetus and pharaonic demigod morph into prisoner and refugee; the sequence of hominid evolution doubles as a scale of moral choices. Iranna's single figure does not remain enclosed in a hermetic Modernist isolation; rather, it summons a sociality into being.
An unmistakably autobiographical note sounded through Iranna's works during the late 1990s, when he developed such protagonists as the yogi meditating among cattle, the questor traversing landscapes punctuated by ploughshares, lamp-columns, tree-stumps, chain-hooks and phallic horns springing from trapdoors. Updating M.F. Husain's "Zameen" (1955), one of the canonical works of postcolonial Indian art, Iranna substituted its idyllic folk-Romanticism with an awareness of ecological degradation, peasant immiseration, the destruction of communities, environments and lifeworlds by the engines of discompassionate progress. Iranna, we must remember, was born in the village of Sindgi, in Bijapur district, in 1970; as an art student, he moved beyond the ambit of his Lingayat farming background, going first to Gulbarga, then to Delhi (where he lives and works) and London.
These rapid shifts of scene demanded adaptability and resilience: they enriched the young artist's consciousness yet surely also generated an existential unease. We may justifiably interpret the recurrent figure that negotiates an estranged and estranging environment in Iranna's paintings as an oblique self-portrait: a figure that confronts obstacles, practises new reflexes. During the late 1990s, Iranna also attended to the formal problem of establishing a significant relationship between this compelling figure and its ground, variously activated as a field of occupancy, illusionistic backcloth or allegorical landscape. In defining the ground, Iranna celebrated his Klimt-like love of pattern for itself, while also rephrasing the natural as a sumptuousness, the paintings clothed in a skin of jewelled gold.
... and "Walking on shadow", 66 by 66 inches, acryllc on tarpaulln.
Iranna's accomplishment, in the present suite, is to extend his investment in the figure considerably, in terms both of pictorial inventiveness and metaphorical charge. His aims are two-fold: first, to consolidate the archetypal figure as bearer of existential crisis, and second, to restate the relationship between this figure and a ground characterised by sensuous plenitude as well as menace. Typically, the relationship between figure and landscape takes the form of dream and perplexity in these new paintings. Iranna's figure tests its limits, probing and gauging its surroundings, measuring the possible resistance that a wall, a water surface, the air, or a staircase might put up, wondering whether it should disturb the world's equilibrium. The protagonist of "Untitled", for instance, stands on a springboard: he sizes up a wall striated with rich bands of red and gold, and studded with gravity-defying teacups and saucers, their bizarre near-realism punctured by drips of paint, pointed up by loops threading in and out of the ground, motifs that improbably cast shadows.
Iranna also multiplies the single figure into a group elaborating its shared perplexity through the performance of cathartic dramatisations. In "Chorus", two figures (or a self and its image?) scream silently, running away from a catastrophe, as bricks explode, float and fall. This is a slow-mo echo of iconic Vietnam images, but before we can become emotionally involved, we realise the scene is maya, a screen pegged on a clothesline, a painting fluttering in the wind within a painting. Similarly, the rogues' gallery provides the ironic model for "No One's Face", which assembles a series of partially effaced portraits. In a polity of clones, what is the real? In a hall of mirrors, which reflection is the original? Where does the object end and the shadow begin?
Iranna uses the shadow as an illusionistic trigger in these works, but also as a tenebrous cloud accompanying the figure, casting its musculature and purposiveness into doubt, as with the slouching protagonist of "Walking on Shadow", a smear glimpsed through rain or frosted glass. For the split second when the illusion operates, the shadows urge us to recognise the erotics of friction "desire veined with anxiety" sparked off by Iranna's palpably sensuous surfaces. For these beautifully variegated, tapestried surfaces are painted in acrylic on tarpaulin, that rough proletarian medium, used to wrap goods on trucks and long-distance coaches.
Iranna's surfaces propose a resolution to the perennial antithesis between figure/self and ground/world, dissolving their apparent duality in a relational circuit of interplay. In "Bouncer", for instance, he orchestrates an interrelation between the self-absorbed figure bouncing on a pair of springs, and a ground detailed in a myriad floating eyes: the figure is married to the ground by a rain of paint dribbles, its foetal crouch-and-release movements graphed over the ground in Muybridge-like flickers. This pictorial resolution, describable as a figural landscape, is no semblance of the natural, but a trope composed from annotations: the original that it simulates is a reality of affect, not a material reality. In a period dominated by artistic strategies that unmask and dismantle, Iranna chooses, instead, to espouse an art of measured additive procedure and philosophical reflection.
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