Tentative self-moulding in travel
"450 miles of thriving silence", Rajarshi Sengupta's just concluded exhibition evoking-narrating-explaining the role of journeys through the spaces, sights and sensations of geography and history in the fluid process of identity formation (Sumukha, August 25 to September 15), had one responding to it simultaneously with excited appreciation and some irritation or confusion. The dual state appeared to be both welcome, even expected by the show's theme along with the methodological premise and still obfuscating in the end as to its basic intentions, since the viewer was not always sure how to interpret things.
Eventually, considering the Kolkatan artist's very young age, one perhaps understood the situation to have been brought on by an uneasy relationship between the sincerity of his sometimes naïve frankness during an unresolved, multifarious endeavour and the obligation to display cerebral complexity. As such, the visitor as well as the artist accepted the necessity of verbal explanation to straighten some rather inevitable misconceptions. For instance, the central motif of ample bright red floral fabric designs could be at first glance associated with femininity as interpreted by a male painter, but it turned out to arise from the reference to traditional textile industry in Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh where Sengupta travelled from Bangalore and which triggered the inspiration for the current work.
The onlooker's uncertainty grew not only because the images presumed contradictoriness and verge condition on inputs but also because the pieces oscillated from the literal to the deliberately clouded. The former came with the sole installation which consisted of a fancifully painted contemporary valise of an umbilical link with a boxed array of pictures of motion from a metallic human leg to a variety of new and dated vehicles. The several mixed media paintings fell into partly overlapping series that covered and connected different sides of the travelling for self-knowledge phenomenon. Sengupta seemed to be more comfortable with small formats that responded to their intimate viewing address.
A majority expressed or alluded to as well as illustrated or symbolised the permeable and ever mutating, contrary yet complementary stratification of elements that add to the state and sights of voyaging. Dynamic, fanning out dotted lines coexist there with indications and transformations of map markings of rivers, roads and shores which are echoed in the interrupted yet progressing trajectories of trees whose stylised, linear silhouettes acquire qualities of textile patterns, the latter partly approximating live blossoms and chillies, but partly becoming ornate, flat block prints.
Human figures likewise fluctuate from the fairly realistic precise to roughened and to mannered. Their seeming concreteness and profusion becomes somewhat undone amid the misty rubbings and running water colour hazes in landscapes that could be in the air, while the brief words of a hand written-typed character mischievously point towards inherent contradictions of everything. Yet more layering enters with the more convincing, colour-wise sombre series referring to the colonial-time textile industry and the mutually influenced cultural hybrids shaping on the sides of the rulers and the ruled. One did admire the dense accumulation of images and times, but the tone should have avoided too much indulgence.
Between courage and convention
The eight participants of the "Srujana Spanda" exhibition at Rasa Art Gallery (September 8 to 13) were fresh post-graduates from Bangalore University, their youthfulness bringing together typical beginnings of diverse aesthetic and thematic strands on the line from natural individualism to fair conventionality. One liked the comparatively courageous and socially relevant ventures into the strange complexities of urban reality, especially the personal take of Sagar Dandotti who with an unforced lyricism and humour conjures fantastic-practical machines.
The printmakers Shivayogi R Annanavar and Jagadeesha K M with fair fluency layered and cramped aspects of city into hybrid environs, using well the mutually responsive means of texturing and clear designing.
In the similarly aligned water colours of Swetha Y, the concrete-organic world approximated a slightly too patterned jigsaw, whereas Veeresh Rudraswami in his acrylics on paper conjured abstracted suggestions of the condition. If his large canvases seemed excessively design-based for their meaning, Sujata Shetty painted vast nocturnal scenes of feminine immersion in plant-life that also relied on mannered designing.
Of the two sculptors, a bolder but not yet resolved and not always independent, effort came from Asha Rani with her truncated figures and juxtaposition of alien materials. While she resorted to abstraction to evoke an imbalanced state, Deepu S R created highly abstracted figures based on typical modernist precedents and freer but only pleasant informal pieces in textured glass.