An elusive fluidity of the real
The exhibition by Babu Eshwar Prasad, Ravikumar Kashi and Murali Cheeroth, brought together by Right Lines and Five Forty Five at the latter venue (August 11 to September 14), does not state a common address whereas in fact revealing certain characteristic aspect of the current world.
This comes perhaps naturally from the fact that all these Bangalore artists are early mid-career artists who primarily paint very proficient in realism, which they use neither in a conventional manner nor towards an artificial contemporariness.
Rather, with its linguistic help they register directly a variety of quite separate regions of the actual to, in tune with how the actual behaves now, thread from those a more complex, often contradictory and deceptive picture or evocation of the broader and deeper vista.
Thanks to his focussing, instead of representing ideas on sheer sensation around how we see the enigmatic and ever changing character of the world, the imagery of Babu Eshwar Prasad, indeed its poetry, as he stresses, has a lasting impact, furthered by the technical finesse.
A good example here is his "Wrapped" where a delicately and precisely brushed cloth bundle refuses full access to its content hidden inside as against the apparently obvious loudspeakers above it. The contrasts and simultaneous pervasiveness of plasticity, layered luminosity and flatness enhances that verge condition.
The larger canvas seems to allude to Andrea Anastasio's musing about our adaptation of the feral beast into commerce, fashion and design, while it shifts, juxtaposes and partly merges its diverse manifestations amid an environ of landscape as well as interior, of evenness as well as recess, of naivety as well as sophistication, the constant fluctuation being recalled and contemplated slowly and keenly with a feel of elusive passing time that connects everything and yet shows its contrariness or separateness.
With equal technical skill, though deliberately processed by a degree of roughness and the employment of some non-painterly means, Ravikumar Kashi depicts the current-day state of fragmented, dissipated spectatorship disseminated by the omnipresence of television which both allows breaks in non-cinema, domestic viewing and contains fragmentation in the use of film scenes in advertising, etc.
His approach is multifarious at first glance, since it includes a painted canvas and a series of digital prints from conventional Bollywood stills on TV monitors whose three-dimensional cast cotton rag substance maybe refers to television being the new book.
The viewer's "Chair" and the TVs distort the immediate in a fairly descriptive, if not literal, way, however, under the surface broken up by slightly shifting squares of an architectural cum interior character. The composite aggressiveness or at least forced divisiveness inherent to the reality now gains in literal presentation with Murali Cheeroth.
Aiming at description and also lyrical suggestiveness, he collages his urban sceneries of alluringly bright skies, high-rises and metallic arms of construction cranes, while organic creatures and humans ill fit it or perish in it.
One may prefer the simpler but quietly worked and expressive cases where the painter refrains from story telling, like in the water colour with a fish with a lotus growing from its belly.
Organic connection
The Lalbagh vicinity of 1, Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery has inspired many of its resident artists, the latest being Malaysian Chang Yoong Chia.
His exhibition "The Botany of Desire" (August 11 to 20) came as one of the finest seen there, the colonial-time park having turned into the trigger as well as focus of an organic connection between Chia's country and India, their ancient and recent history and culture along with the present to be interpreted in both an involved, personal manner and a distanced, broader one.
Equipped simultaneously with a youthfully mischievous excitement and a calmer, mature empathy - frank yet tolerant, humorous yet serious, Chia created a theatre of stories told by images and words drawing on the dual but linked classical traditions on par with ordinary life today and its popular culture.
The central illustrated theatre motif embraced South-east Asian shadow puppets together with their Indian origin and current reference, as the work on entering seemed to be black and white shadow figures on canvas, their flat, cut-out-like figures based on foliage. Behind the canvas, the small peepal leaves told about Lalbagh lovers, arranged marriage plans, queen Victoria and animal heroes whose fate was depicted in bright hues on the larger leaves.
Between the leaf silhouettes and their veins, the little paintings mediated contemporary naivety and classical intricacy, roughness and grandeur, cinematic loudness and tenderness, amusing awkwardness and grace, while realistic water colours on the wall and a row of real dry foliage on the floor completed the environment.
The exhibition by Babu Eshwar Prasad, Ravikumar Kashi and Murali Cheeroth, brought together by Right Lines and Five Forty Five at the latter venue (August 11 to September 14), does not state a common address whereas in fact revealing certain characteristic aspect of the current world.
This comes perhaps naturally from the fact that all these Bangalore artists are early mid-career artists who primarily paint very proficient in realism, which they use neither in a conventional manner nor towards an artificial contemporariness.
Rather, with its linguistic help they register directly a variety of quite separate regions of the actual to, in tune with how the actual behaves now, thread from those a more complex, often contradictory and deceptive picture or evocation of the broader and deeper vista.
Thanks to his focussing, instead of representing ideas on sheer sensation around how we see the enigmatic and ever changing character of the world, the imagery of Babu Eshwar Prasad, indeed its poetry, as he stresses, has a lasting impact, furthered by the technical finesse.
A good example here is his "Wrapped" where a delicately and precisely brushed cloth bundle refuses full access to its content hidden inside as against the apparently obvious loudspeakers above it. The contrasts and simultaneous pervasiveness of plasticity, layered luminosity and flatness enhances that verge condition.
The larger canvas seems to allude to Andrea Anastasio's musing about our adaptation of the feral beast into commerce, fashion and design, while it shifts, juxtaposes and partly merges its diverse manifestations amid an environ of landscape as well as interior, of evenness as well as recess, of naivety as well as sophistication, the constant fluctuation being recalled and contemplated slowly and keenly with a feel of elusive passing time that connects everything and yet shows its contrariness or separateness.
With equal technical skill, though deliberately processed by a degree of roughness and the employment of some non-painterly means, Ravikumar Kashi depicts the current-day state of fragmented, dissipated spectatorship disseminated by the omnipresence of television which both allows breaks in non-cinema, domestic viewing and contains fragmentation in the use of film scenes in advertising, etc.
His approach is multifarious at first glance, since it includes a painted canvas and a series of digital prints from conventional Bollywood stills on TV monitors whose three-dimensional cast cotton rag substance maybe refers to television being the new book.
The viewer's "Chair" and the TVs distort the immediate in a fairly descriptive, if not literal, way, however, under the surface broken up by slightly shifting squares of an architectural cum interior character. The composite aggressiveness or at least forced divisiveness inherent to the reality now gains in literal presentation with Murali Cheeroth.
Aiming at description and also lyrical suggestiveness, he collages his urban sceneries of alluringly bright skies, high-rises and metallic arms of construction cranes, while organic creatures and humans ill fit it or perish in it.
One may prefer the simpler but quietly worked and expressive cases where the painter refrains from story telling, like in the water colour with a fish with a lotus growing from its belly.
Organic connection
The Lalbagh vicinity of 1, Shanthi Road Studio/Gallery has inspired many of its resident artists, the latest being Malaysian Chang Yoong Chia.
His exhibition "The Botany of Desire" (August 11 to 20) came as one of the finest seen there, the colonial-time park having turned into the trigger as well as focus of an organic connection between Chia's country and India, their ancient and recent history and culture along with the present to be interpreted in both an involved, personal manner and a distanced, broader one.
Equipped simultaneously with a youthfully mischievous excitement and a calmer, mature empathy - frank yet tolerant, humorous yet serious, Chia created a theatre of stories told by images and words drawing on the dual but linked classical traditions on par with ordinary life today and its popular culture.
The central illustrated theatre motif embraced South-east Asian shadow puppets together with their Indian origin and current reference, as the work on entering seemed to be black and white shadow figures on canvas, their flat, cut-out-like figures based on foliage. Behind the canvas, the small peepal leaves told about Lalbagh lovers, arranged marriage plans, queen Victoria and animal heroes whose fate was depicted in bright hues on the larger leaves.
Between the leaf silhouettes and their veins, the little paintings mediated contemporary naivety and classical intricacy, roughness and grandeur, cinematic loudness and tenderness, amusing awkwardness and grace, while realistic water colours on the wall and a row of real dry foliage on the floor completed the environment.