Young Bharathesh D Yadav studied at the Chitrakala Parishath college to become a painter. His new video works shown at No 1, Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery (Dec 8 to 9) suggest that he must have found his learnt medium insufficient in linking him to reality as well as in expressing his turbulent empathy. The video means has a potential to both anchor in the actual thanks to its film-based imagery and to generate an unconventional form that can better respond to a contemporary sensitivity. The two films seem to contain traces of this realisation and its process along with their specific themes.
The latter have primarily to do with the layered complexities of feeling and understanding the self amid doubt and amid a striving to sense, almost identify with others. The first works may not be perfect yet, nevertheless, they deserve appreciation for their authenticity and frankness, on the one hand, on the other, often achieving interesting, sometimes truly evocative aesthetic effects.
The artist neither sticks with the literal photographic image nor tries to imitate a traditional painterliness through the digital technology. Rather, he searches for a loose but interrelated array of forms that conjure a visual, very personal aura of stark realisations and poetic intuitions about the present world received largely through the filter of its own materials and techniques.
I am a bad guy questions the place of the artist against a brutal environment of social cruelties, political violence and mundane chores. In a shifting, somewhat blending kaleidoscope of painting fragments, newspaper shots, TV reportage, sketchy signs and drawings accompanied by a mildly disgruntled monologue, there recur scenes of the painter's boots trampling over his canvases. The gesture of admitting the irrelevance of art-making holds however an urge of its necessity.
The second work comes less disjointed and without much obviousness, hence partly quite lyrical, not despite, but within its brutal moments. Sometimes I dream of a tree has the artist fantasising about himself as being a woman as well as a plant. The images oscillate from natural close-ups to clear superimpositions of hybrid opposites and to uncertain mergers. Between the beauty or the roughness of the actual and the hazy, vibrating digital hues and contours, Bharatesh conjures a multilayered and pervasive whole that lets the viewer get the simultaneity of knowing of the difference and the attuned probing that somewhat overcomes the former, while a greater organic connectedness of life enters.
Creative designing
The Graduation 06 show from the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology was as expansive an event as it was admirable (Sumukha, Allaince Francaise, KCP, Dec 10 to 14). In comparison with the applied arts departments of other local institutions, the display proved not only a good aesthetic level and contemporariness but also plenty of invention, involvement and fantasy on par with the practicality of address, sensible treatment of materials, topical connectedness to current reality and local rooting besides often linking with the psychology of the prospective user of their products. If the school does not any more have a separate art departments, it seems that all its potential has percolated to the design and cinematography.
Furthermore, it was gratifying to observe that the students who have been stimulated to find their own understanding of things, instead of being exposed to passive instruction, could and cared to explain and visualise their preoccupation, search and methods. In fact, the same way of working has resulted in artistic creativeness where otherwise plain composing or communication could have been expected, including projects verging on art, like one about assumed identities inspired by the internet.
In particular, one appreciated the handling of traditional Indian fabrics filtered through current sensibilities and the film One in Ten whose form genuinely and naturally draws from raw reality.
Sweetened reality
The Kolkata Kaleidoscope presentation at Gallery-g (Dec 16 to 23) was another, although much more professional in execution, instance of popular idioms from Bengal.
Typically to that, the painters Asit Kumar Sarkar, Ballari Mukherjee, Dhiren Kumar Saha, Kalyan Mulherjee, Derabrata Sarkar and Sukendu Sekhar Saha offered a familiar range of city scenes with old monuments or dilapidated nooks with crows and cycle-rickshaws, marriage bands and colonial-time statues.
Whether focused on texturing, direct realism or surreal moods, the canvases imbibed much pleasantness, Dhiren Kumar Saha being perhaps somewhat more serious and technically accomplished, even free.
Goan vignettes
The latest show at Rightlines (Dec 10 to 22) presented works of two artists from Goa — Francis and Verodina Desousa. Francis Desousa paints quite graphic images of characteristic local types in western attire and habits as well as intimate moments in interiors. In his pastel-tones works he aims at a merger of roughness and warm lyricism which, however, comes through with a degree of awkwardness and vagueness.
Verodina Desousa's terracotta sculptures depict a more general idea of graceful young femininity with a rustic touch. Not loud or evidently cute, the statues nevertheless are fairly diluted and conventional.
Four idioms
This month’s exhibition at the Karnataka Lalita Kala Academy's Varna Gallery gathered yet another set on different and not very original idioms. S M Vernekar's compositions have nice, stylised ladies with birds amid patterned brushing.
Manjunath H Lakshman paints wishy-washy, slightly map-like abstracts with lots of textures and drips. Satish Mutthalli oscillates between abstracted landscape and prettily detailed half-realistic rendering. Only Avinash Tumkur's works try for a more contemporary look with some energy but not without a design-basis.
