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ART
Entering pictorial space
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`Resonance', an exhibition at the Art Musings gallery, Mumbai, brings together paintings by four distinguished artists: K.G. Subramanyan, S.H. Raza, Akbar Padamsee and Ram Kumar. RANJIT HOSKOTE explores their concerns.
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"Untitled", K.G.Subramanyan, watercolour on paper.
THE charm of a quartet lies in its ability to produce a complex, deeply satisfying texture of harmony from apparently diverse talents: each member contributes a special timbre and resolution to the collective effort; and while the presence of the individual is not diminished, the effect is one of solidarity. An exhibition titled "Resonance", currently on the walls of the Art Musings gallery, Mumbai, offers an example of such a successful quartet, bringing together as it does paintings by four distinguished artists: K.G. Subramanyan, S.H. Raza, Akbar Padamsee and Ram Kumar. Each of these artists explores a specific range of emotional nuance, visual interest and conceptual issues; and yet, they are bound by grand patterns as well as incidental details. A palette of blues may connect Raza with Subramanyan, the continuity of colour splendidly defying the distinction between Raza's symbolic articulation and Subramanyan's narrative and figurative concerns. Similarly, a flaming melancholia may relate Ram Kumar's abstractionist landscapes with Padamsee's isolated couples or majestically solitary heads. Such creative transgressions urge us to abandon the obsession with stylistic consistency and recognisability that trammels, for many viewers, the experience of looking at paintings.
Children of the 1920s
At their age and stature, these artists are magisterial in their achievement. And yet, they have reached this destination through journeys that have often been beset by moments of self-questioning, experimental gestures, tentative movements. Each of them has experienced, also, the tension between the free, dynamic image-making impulse and the stasis of the signature demanded by the art economy. Significantly, all four artists were born in the 1920s: that decade of dramatic events when Gandhi directed the energies of colonial India's subject population into the project of liberation from imperial rule. This was also the era in which the emerging international modernisms of Europe began to become available, as artistic positions, to young Indian painters who were impatient with the pieties of academic realism, the mandates of topography and the facile seductions of the picturesque.
These parallel processes of political and artistic emancipation were to peak in the 1940s, and to achieve a considerable, though not comprehensive, measure of success in the following decade. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Subramanyan, Raza, Padamsee and Ram Kumar should have emerged as pioneers of contemporary Indian art in the 1950s. In that decade of apprenticeship, they nourished themselves at the fountainheads of regional and ancestral traditions, whether among the Kushan and Gupta statuary at the epochal Viceregal Lodge exhibition or among the artists and crafts-masters of Santiniketan, while also applying themselves to the internalisation of the expressive languages available in global metropolitan centres such as Paris, London and New York.
The show as a quartet
"Untitled", K.G.Subramanyan, watercolour on paper.
Shaped as a quartet, this exhibition brings together four different pictorial propositions, four different claims on pictorial space. In K.G. Subramanyan's work, the painting becomes the venue for implied narratives that are in varying degrees picaresque, erotic and sly. For S.H. Raza, the painting is a visionary stimulus, ideally, intended to trigger subliminal responses to the transcendent. Akbar Padamsee leads us into a space of refined figuration, where the body resists history yet wears its wounds with pride, balancing in attitude between the hieratic and the human. And to Ram Kumar, the painting is a record of the evanescent threshold between the robustness of the observed landscape and the lyricism of an abstractionist deviation from retinal actuality.
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K.G. Subramanyan's paintings pass easily from the public to the private sphere. So smooth, indeed, are the transitions he effects that we find ourselves in the boudoir even before we realise we have left the marketplace behind. We continue to experience this sense of delayed shock as Subramanyan (born 1924) guides us into the dramas of the private self, of a secret life of fantasy. A consummate storyteller, Subramanyan peoples his universe with concupiscent animals and men seized by desire; he records erotic encounters between an old man and a young woman who seems to have emerged from the sexually liberated Berlin of the 1920s. Subramanyan orchestrates studies in opposites through the cellular spaces his personae inhabit: he passes from the lurid to the sterile, the lascivious to the reticent. His characters range from cats to fisherwomen, courtesans to angels: each conveys its own subtle wisdom. Threading everyday life through genre, Subramanyan invites us to consider women in domestic interiors, household animals acting as spirit familiars, everyday objects developing a tumescent physiognomy. Gentle wit and mordant satire combine in his portraiture of women, especially, whether in the boudoir or in the market: his treatment is suggestive of Eliot's poetry of private dissatisfactions and anxieties, charade and masquerade. The basic tension in Subramanyan's art is that between vulnerability and inviolability, secrecy and exposure: he mediates this through the constant opposition, in his tableaux, between dress and undress, face and mask, the clothed and the naked.
The works of Raza
In his recent works, S.H. Raza (born 1922) takes the blue moon as his focus, as though he were celebrating that rare sighting: the true and unforced image. In this suite of paintings, he explores the archetypal polarity of the solar and lunar realms; the black disc suspended above the herringbone trees could be an eclipsed moon, but equally, an Orphic sun in exile. A founder member of the Progressive Artists' Group, Raza, who has lived in Paris since 1950, early renounced the lavish Kashmir landscapes for which he was known, in favour of the resonant symbolism that has become his hallmark. Through this symbolism, he translates the organic processes of germination, growth, decay and resurgence into a geometry of the Sublime. While he has translated the landscape into the deep colour saturations of an abstract pictorial space occasionally annotated with a floating poem, Raza more often invokes the theme of fertility through such key motifs as the bija or seed, the bindu or focal source, which occupy a central place in his private mythology. The abstractionist approaches the world as an invitation in code, which rewards the deciphering self with expanded awareness. Raza's practice of symbolic abstraction has as much to do with the nature of symbols as it has with the symbols of nature: he encodes his art with memories of earth, river and rain drawn from his childhood in rural Madhya Pradesh, weaving nostalgia through a consciousness of the sensuous present.
Padamsee's `heads'
"Untitled", Akbar Padamsee, oil on canvas, 2004.
Akbar Padamsee (born 1928) often represents his couples as monumental survivors cocooned in one another's warmth, held in a delicate space of shared solitude against a world that has either gone up in catastrophic flames, or is a magnificent echo of their passion or anguish: they are alone with each other, without any trace of ambient life, of society or the passage of time. In this exhibition, Padamsee's painting of a couple, keyed to a sensuous red, is held in counterpoint by a gallery of charcoal heads: those monochrome gestures into which he compresses entire histories of suffering and exaltation. One of Padamsee's charcoal heads seems to emerge from a swarm of bees, the flurry of marks on the surface rising to meet and confuse the eye before the pattern states itself; another seems crumpled on impact with forces that challenge the self, negate its powers of action; yet another is a pensive self-portrait, expressive of the inner self-questioning and scepticism masked by the outward progression of the artist-persona. Padamsee's heads carry forward into the present the radiant presence of the prophets and martyrs who fascinated him during the 1960s. He has dedicated himself, over five decades, to the sensuous discipline of rendering the female nude, the prophetic male figure, the couple, and the visionary landscape, not as literal images but as glowing ideal forms. He returns to genre definitions, not to limit himself in their security, but to test and replenish his imaginative capabilities.
Ram Kumar's re-engagement
Ram Kumar (born 1924) shared with his confreres, in Delhi's Silpi Chakra and Bombay's Progressive Artists Group during the 1950s, the internationalist dream of working in an art language that would be as comprehensible in London or Paris as in New Delhi or Mexico City. Between 1949 and 1952, Ram Kumar studied with Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger in Paris, and joined the French Communist Party; on his return, the feeling grew on him that he was destined to be a resident alien everywhere. Since the 1960s, Ram Kumar's paintings have opened out in sweeps of ochre, viridian and aquamarine, as he has mounted his contemplations of the cosmic cycle of creation, dissolution and regeneration. But in his paintings of the last decade, a residual geography and a notational architecture have crept into the grandeur of the entropic universe: stray signs of settlement and activity have surfaced through the wreckage of a shattered world. The landscape makes concessions, occasionally, to makeshift houses, temples quivering in a haze, isolated boats, steps leading to a river. The human presence returns to Ram Kumar's art through its traces, shoring its fragments against the vast churning of time, vulnerable but not lacking in resilience. While he may have renounced his investment in figuration four decades ago, Ram Kumar has not entirely erased his engagement with the human ability to make sense of a bewildering life world, to survive even the most inclement climates, the most unforgiving of historical pressures.
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