| |
ARTS: IN CONVERSATION
Pictorial Surprise
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
 |
| |
REVEALING PROCESS:
(From above) Singh's completed work 'Crossing the Room'; Sheikh works
on folding screens with bristling colours; Choudhury's mind thinks
in words too
|
But the works also
show that many contemporary artists no longer revere the conventional
sketchbook as the only instrument of record. Photographs, collages, videos,
CDs, computers or erasable blackboards — all seem to have become
privy to the complex processes that define a final work. For instance,
Mumbai-based veteran Sudhir Patwardhan, now an ecological crusader, has
shown his preference for photography as a formative archive. For the "Footbridge
at Ambernath", an anti-romantic take on a messy urban causeway in
Mumbai, Patwardhan has bound pencil sketches with colour snapshots of
the same scenes. The sketches emoted what the photos could not: a desperate,
dissolving city.
The younger artists also had sketchbooks and
other categories of priming that were strictly made-to-order. A. Balasubramanium,
a Chennai-based minimalist and erstwhile printmaker, had a clever relief
of jumbled letters on handmade paper titled "Scattered Conversation"
that led to a bigger work, a homage to artist Yves Klein.
A welcome pictorial surprise was sourced by
Mumbai kid Anandjit Ray in a seven-page treatise, "A visual example
of how a thought or an idea proceeds in my head". In one of the ideas
was the facetious evolution of Ganapati or Ganesha whose head has been
likened to a man wearing a gas mask or scuba-diving suit or a boar skull.
The other idea had a dog that alternatively became a projectile or a bottle
container.
Nicola Durvasula of Hyderabad created memorable
aphorisms in Hindi, English and French-"Line is just a trace of so
much else" and "Space of page, intentional nothingness"-with
snippety graphics on the sides. It was another of her pithy titles that
managed to echo the spirit of the entire exhibition: "Anything goes
in a sketchbook". Even if it is fake.
|
|
METRO TODAY
Web
Exclusives
