Passion and gravity

The very rawness of untrained but sincere amateurishness can have its own power. This depends primarily on whether the artist is able to express his or her experience with an intensity, simplicity or subtlety that draw from authentic sensations and are unaffected by high or popular conventions.

The work of Umi Bedi (Time & Space, Aug 15 to 21) seems to fall somewhere in-between but not without touching the viewer.

What one responds to is the painter's passionate praise of emotional and carnal ardour whose values are placed on par with the symbolism of divine love and martyrdom. It should be appreciated too that, for the evocation of such grave intensity, she has the courage to base on the human figure, revealed in the true shape of its spirit through nudity, and that she adequately sees her imagery on a vast scale. 

On the other hand , the workmanship and the idiom leave much to be desired. Bedi's anatomy, whether handled in a realistic manner or subjected to different kinds of transformation, appears somewhat awkward and loose. Form-wise, the paintings appear to have been vaguely threaded along a number of quite contradictory styles that relate to diverse periods.

A foundation in the classic heroic body of the western tradition becomes superimposed with echoes of 19th century salon art mingled with similarly pretty Post-Impressionistic ones. An Art Nouveau-like sinuosity may pass on to more expressionist ways or a Post-Cubist Picasso-recalling geometrised harshness.

Whichever the option at the moment, even if indistinctly more contemporary, it comes through with an excessive dose of sweetness, sometimes mannerist cuteness. The intended gravity dilutes then in an artificially grand gesture, over-complicated bodily entanglements and draping.

Random trio

The “Shapes and Harmony” exhibition, brought by Raintree Media to The Park hotel (Aug 19, and the 100 ft restaurant (Indiranagar, 22 to 31), was a random togetherness of three artists of different interests and unequal skills. The only contribution that was technically consummate and well composed came from Soumya Manjunath Chavan.

Relying on the repeated and varied geometry of the square and its symbolic evocation of the stable earth and balance, they nonetheless have more to do with the memory of Abstract Expressionism than with tantra and Raza. Their contrasts if saturated, textured pigments that partly blend have a cultured but primarily decorative effect.

Kalian S Rathore pushes the same quality hard towards design in his vibrant abstractions of landscape dense of trees, foliage and sunshine. Whereas these canvases have at least an easy attractiveness, his depictions of animated bulls fall into a still more patterned and robust-sugary formula.

The weakest part of the collection belonged to Dr. Norman Louis Guido. One may perhaps empathise with his admiration for feminine sensuality and tenderness, but its amateurishness merely revels in sentimentality with elements of sweetened voyeurism.

Inspirations from popular western illustration, such Church imagery and second-hand surreal or expressionist modes become filtered through their almost as dated indigenous appropriations.

Half-hearted

The four youngish artists from Chennai who exhibited together at the CKP (Aug 15 to 21) know their techniques but half-heartedly stay on the surface of things. The only dexterous works were the naturalistic peacock sculptures by B.R. Ravi, even though they did not rise beyond copying the real.

S Srinivasan's striving for contemporariness by using negative silhouettes on mirror ground was largely spent on the effect of it. N. Manoharan eclectically shifted from a sketchy realism in genre scenes to Adimoolam-recalling linear images of archaic royalty and sacrum and to loud, abstracted Ganeshas.

S A V Elanchezian combined in his paintings recreations of Revivalist-style Buddha figures and theatrically dramatic rocks to a somewhat facile spiritual impact. One would wish that instead of jumping into short-cut solutions they paid more attention to their real experiences.

Shifting idioms

Another example of rather chance aesthetic choices and their togetherness that suggested a similar randomness was the display by a group of four painters from Kerala and Pondicherry, simultaneous to the previously mentioned show (CKP, Aug 19 to 22). K.K. Sanil Kumar appeared to literally embody such shifting between idioms, since hid light, abstracted sceneries in water colours alternated with oils on canvas which either offered a variant of modernised stylised ethnicity or transformed rustic characters into designs.

Almost geometric designing dominated the works of K. Selvam towards a fairly loud result, whether he focussed on cutely pretty-ugly faces around folkloristic motifs or against a decorative grid made of bright fabric pieces.

S Priya proved to be much more sincere in the general realism of her atmospheric female figures posing in front of natural backgrounds.

Their rendering, however, was received as anachronistic being steeped in late 19th century European salon art. P. Sakthivel's Ganesha images - highly abstracted under free, dynamic impasto brushing, although well executed, complied with another, if less dated, convention.

Cliché

The most clichéd among the several instances of conventionality that one could see recently here were the paintings of Chelian from Chennai (CKP, Aug10 to 14). They ranged from wooden-literal or fanciful copies of old European masters and Impressionists to pretty horse head portraits and to imitations of A Raman' style beside a few other, similarly predictable options.