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Rustic repertoire
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Artist Mani empathy with the rural folks comes through in his `Badami People Series'
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THE SUN-drenched colourful canvases of Bangalore-based artist J.M.S. Mani are peopled with the locals of Badami, a small town in North Karnataka, famous for its temple architecture. The warp and woof that structure his frames of the `Badami People Series' are the effulgent colours and his signatorial attenuated human forms. Mani's works come across as impressionistic, rustic and vibrant, since he privileges a mode and approach that are perceptually light hearted.
The centrality of his themes are the Badami locals, both men and women engaged in their chores at the market place or relaxed in conversation. In this series, Mani represents his insight into the rural folks of this particular locality as a form of collective performance addressed to the urban audience. And this performance involves him in probing the core of local culture to recreate a rural ambience within his frames. Mani in rendering these countryside themes is employing a rhetorical and pictorial strategy to create `documentary romanticism'. And this is enabled by the artist's empathy with the people of the village. The imagery of the peasants and local rural folks is so ubiquitous within the context of modern Indian art that it could never exhaust itself. It was raison d'etre during the Nationalist struggle and is a theme that continues to invade artistic space for many an artist, including Mani, in the post-colonial experience. Says Mani, "The historical location of Badami, the simplicity of people there, who I find hard working and honest in all their ways, inspire me to portray them."
Mani lays emphasis on rendering the ethnic types with dark complexion, including their dress code, which has women in choli and skirt with the odhani lazily draped over and the men in white short kurta and dhotis with majestic turbans adorning their heads. His acrylics on acrylics and oils on canvas create with fluid and loose brush strokes an aura of placid simplicity that underscores the naïve and candid ways of the village folks. By deploying signs like the geometric diamond motifs or the fish, Mani further reinforces the decorative elements derived from folk art tradition common to all regions in India.
In Mani's composition, the spirited patriarchy and concealed dominance find symbolic representation in the fruits and the bird. Many of his compositions are market scenes laid out with succulent fruits as the ripe bananas and the red apples. The latter reminiscent of Cezanne whose preferred studio objects were apples as `they do not move nor talk back,' adding a touch of sensuality. The bird, especially the cock, is a boisterous symbol of the `ubiquitous' feathery arrogance; a familiar phenomenon in rural topography, which Mani has rendered resplendent in its glory of kaleidoscopic sartorial feathers. Mani, a product of the Ken School of Art, Bangalore, has credited his artistic vision to inspiration derived from such modernist artists as Picasso and closer home to veterans like K.M. Adimoolam and R.M. Hadpad.
The show opens tomorrow at Amethyst, Sundar Mahal, and concludes on September 28.
ASHRAFI S. BHAGAT
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