Expressive staging
The 'Pondicherry' photographs by Sebastian Cortes at Tasveer (November 10 to 30) offered a charmingly classic and sensitive insight into the unique character and atmosphere of the place.
It was perhaps inevitable for a Western photographer living now largely in the country to be drawn to Pondicherry's often comfortably and acceptingly loose symbiosis of different cultures and layers of time with a specific undercurrent of bygone France.
But the outcome, more than expected, endears with the kind of warmth and perceptiveness that thoroughly blend probing distance with the intimate immediacy of an insider.
Whether aided or not by his association with the theatricality of fashion photography presentation, the artist is attuned to as well as enhances the element of self-revelatory staging that remains intrinsic to how architecture and human surroundings are consciously as well as intuitively shaped in order to mediate mundane practicality with imposing display.
The image of an empty old cinema interior with rows of seats focussed on the large, luminous screen appears to capture that mutuality between the receptive observer and the evocative space where Cortes locates himself.
That position within the process of discovering and experiencing the mood in and together with the behaviour of architecture bearing traces of the human presence can be sensed, especially, in the many shots of colonial time building interiors. With a tinge of inner drama, he looks at things frontal and symmetric along with depth, and waits long until they slowly yield more of their nature or he seeks such disclosures during somewhat quicker, more dynamic encounters with angled, far-receding flights.
The spectator then becomes almost a participant in the unfolding of the display-recognition. Frequently devoid of inhabitants, the spacious elegance of the massive columns and soft arches under plentiful, dainty candelabra, amid the intricately carved wood of furniture, its browns and greys bleached by age as well as intruded into by useless fragments of rejected domesticity, suggests the beautiful yet rough sadness of the grand era that has passed away but having imprinted itself on the present and survives as memory of relic as well as in hybrid coexistence with new and diverse forms of life.
As European structures and architectural details finely mediate the indigenous inner courtyard, whose illumination seems simultaneously dramatic and private, they enter into relationships with more visible but ignored or unassumingly welcome seams or rifts when in westernised environs, combining graceful antiques with plain new plastic, otherwise muted down under the predominance of traditional Indian structures, dense Hindu icons and equally profuse human business and decor.
With a similarly evident merger and separateness, Cortes empathically probes and assimilates the verge between houses and tropical nature, also between aesthetic qualities and kitsch, drawing from the latter both a literal and poetic surround that speaks of human life behind - naïve, even crude as well as delicate or exuberant and loving. Dark, forlorn, archaic sights contrast yet connect with images of the cherished past in the carefully polished surfaces of furniture, otherwise with airy, illuminated, translucent ones from the spiritual environs of Auroville. If concentrating on people, the artist approaches them quite like architecture - stressing the obediently spreading regularity of RSS trainees, recalling the rows of medicinal bottles elsewhere or the quiet liveliness of idlers along a beach front, otherwise emphasising the dynamic engagement between a person and his/her possessions, workplace with its objects and other people, as the dissipating viewpoints and image blurring add to the state of responsive linkage. Among the best are the scenes of a naturally surreal stage where the grandeur and artificiality of plant-life, wild yet tamed in the city, cohabits with religious idols, ritual-mundane priesthood and traces of daily life.
Literal
abstractions
'Tortoise Venus Nautilus', Anuradha Nalapat's exhibition at Galerie Sara Arakkal (November 17 to December 8), was an ambitious exploration of universal connectedness on the micro and macro planes, alluding to mathematical and scientific ratios behind its spontaneous rhythms and recurring forms that govern mundane human life along with its organic and mystical or philosophical aspects. Since the concepts were verbally explained and poetically evoked in the catalogue text, the large canvases and drawings may have looked somewhat like illustrations to it, especially that they tended to oscillate between the obviously depicted or symbolised, the pleasantly patterned and the abstracted for expressiveness. The frequent snail shapes and spiralling shell forms amid graph-like motifs and dotted trajectories, cosmic as well as minute, interspersed with schematic human and tree silhouettes and sinking into amorphous, textured spaces, in particular when accompanied by gently sweet hues, verged on pleasant design. Better were the black and white images that calmly tried to merge representative residues with gesture-laden abstraction.
Marta Jakimowicz