Foreword
Johny ML

The idea of this show was originated in me during the month of February 2007. For the first time in my life I visited the illustrious Santiniketan to attend an international seminar on the life and works of Ramkinker Baij. So many mysteries were revealed to me in this visit as Reji Arakkal (then a final year MFA student in the painting department at Kalabhavana) took me to see the Santal villages in and around Santiniketan. He had done a series of charcoal drawings of the Santal huts, indigenously built and decorated. While pedaling through the neat and narrow allies, I realized how Reji had transcended the quotidian into sublime. There was an organic connection between those huts and his drawings. The images in his drawings looked animated and having their own lives as forms that were familiar and mysterious. Later in February, I visited Lochan Upadhyay at his studio in Baroda, where he showed me, to my surprise, a series of charcoal drawings with objects and landscapes that emanated a sense of otherworldliness. Somehow, I remembered a misty morning at the shores of the Kopai River in Santiniketan.

The mundane and the mysterious; in art there happens an alchemy that converts the mundane into a mystery. Can art transform the mysterious into the ordinary? Science does that. It explains so many mysteries for the common comprehension. Perhaps, conceptual art too tries to demystify art and gets mystified in the process. Whether we accept it or not art has an element of mystery in it. Why does an artist organize a particular form, color in a particular way? Why does he differ from another artist who deals with the same subject? May be I do not dare to call it personal genius as genius is a notion that is much contested in our post modern times. However, something personal, some mastery that is ingrained in the psychological, intellectual and aesthetical make up of the artist makes him distinct from the other. I would call the four young painters in this show ‘masters’ because I acknowledge their mastery in aesthetically dealing with the mundane situations.

During 1970s mystery in art had been a much maligned notion. Art historians and critics, who underlined the social functions of art, accused the artists of taking art away from the people. Mostly the accusations were leveled against the abstractionists who tried to define their art through mystical terms. Art history and criticism of those times were coming mostly from the Frankfurt School theoreticians who emphasized individual consciousness and rejected the orthodox Marxist pragmatism and metaphysical interpretations of nature. They wanted to orient theory towards practice. It was against this backdrop the mystery of art became retrogressive, anti-people and fascist.

The globalization process, the logic of late capitalism and all that facilitate the proliferation of these, including the information technology that erases the boundaries of nationalities virtually have catalyzed the disintegration of mystery within the fields of human creativity. The creative output of an artist, now qualified as ‘product’ is forced to be seen as a ‘product’ without mysteries. Studies in fashion industry have revealed that many people no longer use the ‘products’ that they buy from the market for the fear that the very opening of the seal of the package would snap the mystery of it. It has created a situation where the actual use demystifies a product and taking it out and away from the system of ‘using/consuming’ invests it with mystery. Art, in this sense, has become an overused category, whose mystery erased in the process.

Do we then demand, at least remotely, that art should be reinvested with mysterious and mystical qualities, and also take it away from the product line? I think, this should be happening in the critical viewing of the art. In the present context, art is viewed as a product, which could be used and over used by multiple economic exchanges. The history of the images that constitute the art forms is mostly neglected. It demands an act of reclamation; the reclamation of the mystery of art. This reclamation should then become the starting point from where art can orient itself towards its socio-political and cultural interventions. Then art as a product, which could be used and kept away from use become discursively relevant in our times. Otherwise, art will generate only money while erasing the product from the historic continuities.

This show is all about mysteries; mysteries of images, relationships and human connectivity. I met Anjaneyulu over emails and then through the chat box. We exchanged ideas and images over a year. He paints utensils and tools in a hyper-realist style. A cursory viewing may make you feel that there is no hidden truth or mystery in them. But when you look at those painted tools and utensils deeply, they take the shape of a monologue of the artist who constantly talks about the missing images from our visual culture. Like several words and expressions lose their relevance in the common parlance either through replacement or through the erasure of socio-cultural memory, many of the images that Anjaneyulu paints are no longer in use. These defunct tools reveal a time and its mysteries, when the object-subject relationship had another meaning and relevance. Anjenayulu’s is a mysterious visual language for the reclamation of history and time, which cannot be defined within the set frame work of mediatic realism.

Siji Krishnan’s works are all about mundane situations. However, the images of a girl suckling at her father’s nipples, a girl sitting at the edge of a hospital bed, two men holding their hands in a way makes someone think of them as ‘gays’ and so on would make the viewer to think a bit more beyond the images. These images are not imposing. They look like mild whisperings; a feeble talk from a hospital bed. Why does one woman artist of our times paint like this? Siji perhaps does not know anything about feminist discourse, though she understands most of the women in the world are the victims of certain situations. Her works in fact, demand an empathetic viewing; hold the hands of that girl who is sitting on the hospital bed, that simple touch may make you understand the depth of her works. One has to experience the mystery of touch, at least mentally. And one has to remember a face that suddenly turns into spring by that touch under the pale yellow bedside lamp.

The title of the show ‘Mysteries: Pictures of the Mystical Memories’ in a way explains the works presented in this exhibition. They are about a missing link that connects the mysterious with the mundane or the other way round. Each image in this show is about the mysterious feelings that the artists had while witnessing the quotidian life. They have captured the essence of the ordinary in their respective aesthetical terms. I am reminded of a Bob Marley song, “There is a natural mystic going through the air, if you listen carefully then you will hear.” Those who have the eyes and ears to receive the mysteriousness of the life situations would see the essence of these images. I thank Dilip Narayanan of Gallery OED for taking up this project towards fulfillment.

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