Lines lighten up
Another exhibition by Dhiraj Choudhury at Time & Space (November 22 to 30) was somewhat different from the earlier ones where ambitious, large canvases enhanced the degree of mannerism that underlies his style. The smaller works on paper now did carry the major constituents of the idiom, but being less formal as sketches, they gained, if not spontaneity, at least more liveliness and, more importantly, a sense of atmospheric authenticity through which the painter's emotive response was retained.
The new paintings and drawing, indeed, adhere to the familiar and somewhat formulaic array of themes, forms, motifs and aesthetic means which evidence this senior Kolkatan artist's belonging to the inheritors of Indian modernism. His protagonists blend an idealised rusticity of sensual and vivacious yet innocent delicacy with motherly tenderness against a landscape of lush plants, animals and mythic imagery. This often acquires hybrid shapes with a robust erotic undercurrent. The secular acceptance of Islamic and Christian references within the Hindu core speaks of a humanist stand - well intended but bound by a pleasant surface that translates even suffering onto gentle grace. Despite their external differences, Choudhury can be here equated with his contemporaries such as Jatin Das and Sunil Das. Quite like their work, his is based on linear, contoured silhouettes and numerous, bright colours that, although vibrantly textured and overlapping lines, remain rather separate from those.
His mainstream figure keeps to the device of cute transposition from the direct whose elongations, attenuations and rough-pointed angles oscillate between the illustrational and the stylised. In the quicker drawings Choudhury loosens up multiplying tentative, approximating strokes towards a more expressive impact, while his hues reciprocate. Whereas certain formalistic attempts at contemporising the idiom, like light, negative lines, hardly convince, one responds to the images that partly accept the immediate and turn back to the realistic foundation. Besides appreciating his consummate skills there, one is able to gain insight into genuinely felt moods. Perhaps the best of such works is the untitled scene with a young boy amazed by his awaking to eroticism.
Digital focus
The latest exhibition at Crimson (The Hatworks Boulevard, November 21 to December 19) brings together two painters who have much in common. Born in Kerala but educated and living elsewhere, these early mid-generation artists have a good hold on realistic workmanship which they employ in styles that rely on the so-called mediatic realism that quite some time ago appeared as a phase in the oeuvres of a number of important contemporary individualities of Mumbai to soon spread all over the country as a fashionable trend. Using formal properties of the photographic, film, television, digital and Xerox image, it aimed at commenting on the human predicament and the lies of technologically filtered perception. When popularised, it carried its social engagement on the surface while the attractive, catchy form became the main preoccupation.
This seems to be the status of the paintings by Azis T M and Murali Cheeroth. Azis was known earlier for his photographically over-sharpened images that eventually absorbed a softer realism, both variants depending largely on spectacular design elements. This time the pattern element remains but drawn from the blurred, vibrating trajectories of digital transmission. Surrounded by its rhythms and broken up by it, his figures of street children become a dizzy part of it. The effect is cultured yet formalist and somewhat formulaic. The same words can be applied to the paintings of Cheeroth, even if on the face of it they appear bold. The artist makes a statement about militarization in his images of armed soldiers against tilting diagonals, psychedelic hues, enhanced photographic-TV highlights and neon hazes. To say it again, the canvases are consummately rendered but offer a déjà vu.
Formalist options
The joint exhibition by Jane Chakravarthy, a British artist and poet living in Bangalore, and photographer Krishanu Chatterjee (CKP, November 17 to 23) must have had genuine intentions behind it resulting, however, in fairly formalist and conventional works. "The Human Condition" paintings of Chakravarthy wish to evoke intense moods of dynamic processes of generation on a cosmic and an intimate plane as well as the turbulent emotions of love. What comes out, yet, is a rather amateurish play with messy or patterned application of pigments with an occasional naïve figuration. Chatterjee's prints can be cultured in a classic way when sensitively and directly responding to scenery, although he overuses clichéd black silhouetting. Unfortunately, he too is often tempted to conjure superficially alluring but merely formal, hence artificial and empty, indulgencies.
Modest attempts
The recent show from students of the Ken School of Art (Varna, Kannada Bhavan, November 23 to 27) brought the usual gamut of old-fashioned styles that still characterise the teaching methods in the institution but without the sporadic genuine attempts at contemporary references and aesthetic language that one could observe in previous exhibitions. So, among the paintings and prints there prevailed second-hand modernist distortions whose forced nature resembled that of symbolic hybrid imageries. Those proved as weak as the vague realism of the direct depictions. The sculptural works with a frequent element of installation laudably employed humble, accessible materials, like ropes, but ended in mere formalist exercises.
Commercial
The new display at the Chitrakala Parishath (November 22 to 28) by H.C. Arun, a city engineer and photographer, as a declared "Melange" gathered together a somewhat chance assortment of topics and styles. Their main linking trait perhaps was the artist's dependence on over-familiar advertising paradigms. The prints are certainly very professional technically but as conventional. Whether he shoots fields of happy sunflowers or blossoms in glass containers, they strike as easily elegant and predictable. Better results arise if Arun allows himself some naturalness and attuning to the undulation of a green hill or, especially, when he looks intimately and close on at a baby in its mother's arms.
