The conspicuous differences between the works of the two artists emerge out of certain fundamental shifts in their ways of seeing life and their individual psyche.

Vinayak Bhattacharya employs cropped images of still objects, which hint at an invisible space beyond the limit of the images. Often these objects are multiple in number. Anjaneyulu G’s   images, on the other hand are singularly rendered, placed against a white wall that contrasts with the recluse object, demarcated from the white space by a sharp shadow that contours it. Where the former artist refers to an endless, infinite world, the latter unwittingly hints at a world that is framed, and consequently, finite. Vinayak’s images of melon pulp strewn about, or a pomegranate cut open with its seeds dispersed and trickles of juice coming out of it, flooding on a map – a cheap reproduction of the political map, meant to be used by youngsters at schools – resembling shreds of human flesh, taking the shape of a gory massacre or the ruthless butchery after a blast; predominantly hinting at a grotesquery that can often be compared to Francis Bacon’s own; whetting up repulsion that most of us develop after witnessing a bloody sight. Anjaneyulu’s, on the other hand are exotic, majestically rendered images of objects that presently arrest our gaze with almost a hypnotic effect which leave us drooling over them. Another interesting observation is that, Vinayak blows up the images on the canvas and uses digital photographs as references for a Hyperrealistic finish. Anjaneyulu, on the other hand, does not photograph his objects at all and instead of blowing them up on the canvas, he replicates them. He hangs each of the objects of his choice from the wall and renders them with marvelous precision. His are, therefore, systematic studies of objects. This realization brings out another revelation – a camera being a single lens reflector (SLR) is incapable of having a peripheral sight, what the human eye, comprising of two lenses, can do so spontaneously. It therefore, adds to the study of the differences between the two artists and their very ways of seeing.

ANJANEYULU G

Arika Avigdor,Wayne Thiebaud,the death of privacy; and me.
Like, it’s all over and I am left with nothing but the pieces to pick up
I really don't know how I got here, but got here, I did.
It's at the very beginning all over again.
It's dark.
Pitch Black
Gradually and very very gradually I see the grays emerge.
Simple forms.
Just enough light now.
It’s all shadows though, but no whining on that.
A screwdriver here,
A mobile charger there,
Nails on the floor,
Match sticks strewn all over:
The discovery of the elements all over again….
                                                                      - Anjaneyulu G

Anjaneyulu G (b.1976) paints recognizable objects, almost banal from use in every day life. Being a student of Visual Arts at the JNT University, Hyderabad; an institution where his training began conventionally with still life, studies, portraits and modeling, the artist’s earliest work marks its departure from this point. Later, the work of Wayne Thiebaud, Arika Avigdor and Lucien Freud have been seminal in the development of his paintings. While he mentions freely many artists who have influenced him, his work is so singularly his own that these ‘influences’ are more to be seen as parallel accomplishments rather than anything having a direct bearing upon his work. He, like them, is concerned with something more than that chicanery that makes us see a face where there is only paint arranged upon a surface. He seems to wish to join on that surface both the things seen and the thing as seen by a responsive human being who invests all that he sees with something of himself. Once more, writes he:

Now
Cutting pliers here,
A nutcracker there,
An umbrella hanging off a nail on the wall.
Things organizing themselves.
A composition at work.
Where there was Stasis
Movement is in
Unfailingly.
I am around though.
I need now to start and god knows where from….
Start I will; start I will have to.
There's no choice there.
Alone.
Alone in a crowd where every one's alone.
We will have to make do.
Surely; at least for a while.

The propensity of materials forms an interesting observation in the artist’s work – how one takes a single medium (acrylic, here) and make it function for the replication of a plethora of materials – a pair of rusty pliers with their rubber grip; a canvas ruck-sack as opposed to the shining blade of a dagger that hangs down from its leathern sheath, its steely chill stands in complete contrast with the warmth of the leathern cover; a waterproof umbrella with its plastic handgrip; matchsticks that lay strewn about; a woolly softness of a pullover – and so on and so forth: a kind of reclaiming  of still-life objects.

His idea of singling out the objects definitely recalls Thiebaud’s rhetoric of isolation of objects and consequently the Marxian hypothesis – the ‘Law of Negation’. The paradox of multiple existence and the underlining poignance of the awareness of being alone in the crowd, echoes an unheard cry. The same poignant feeling as arises when one reads Joyce’s short story, ‘Araby’. However, by the process of singling out the objects, Anjaneyulu does not only emphasize their functional value, but takes them to an ethereal plane, in a way, consecrating them.

VINAYAK  BHATTACHARYA

Vinayak Bhattacharya’s (b. 1963) canvases comprise of images of fruits that form a metaphor for his imagery. Crowded with seeds of a pomegranate cut open, they perhaps speak of a nation and its multitude of people – all jammed up into a container (here the outer cover of the fruit). Elsewhere, the extracted pulps of a watermelon strewn on a blank political map form his subject: all of which resemble an after- effect of a Supernova. The succulent seeds of the pomegranate or the luscious pulp of the watermelon, often mashed to produce a thick roseate juice, smearing the surface/floor on which they lie strewn about, characterize his work. What the onlooker, quite intuitively and impulsively reads from these images is not always a happy conclusion; for, the images often take the shape of a dismal metaphor of a human massacre. Mangled, misshaped bodies, disjecta membra, smeared with blood – a similar sight after a blast or a similar catastrophe. The employment of a blank political map is an obvious connotation of the geographical boundaries of the nation. Also, the purchasing of such cheap maps from the local stationery shops is a deliberate hint at the concept of the ‘local’, – our very own, and represented through the locally available material.
 
Vinayak’s Realism arises out of his witnessing reality. His first encounter with painting started with a local art teacher, at Ashoknagar (in the suburbia of Calcutta where the artist lives) who had a leftist bent of mind and whose dexterous naturalistic renditions (such as differentiating between the two eyes of a man, blind in ones, which is replaced with a stone one), are a result of his being a product of a colonial art institution in West Bengal. For  the artist, the concept of painting ideally, after the most naturalistic fashion, grew out of such an encounter, and through a feeling of consecration towards Academic Realism.

 The turbulent history of the 70s – the Naxalite movement – left in his tender heart a deep scar. He now is witness to a plethora of anti social activities – hand-made bombs hidden at a corner of their ground floor veranda; his family protecting the young activists from the clutches of police by sheltering them underneath their bed; a procession demonstrating the dead body of a young activist, with his lower jaw blown off by an indiscriminate police firing. The body was tied to a bed that stood vertically upright on a lorry and his horribly deformed face moved from side to side as the vehicle moved.

Born into an amiable family of Marxist parents, Vinayak witnessed people from all walks of life. There was no discrimination on his parents’ part, though; visitors to the household from the proletarian classes would make themselves comfortable by sitting on the floor and his amiable father, embarrassed by the act, would urge them to sit on a chair. Such acts eventually led to the artist’s understanding of class conflict (another reality, he could never do away with) and finally Dialectical Materialism. Later, when he left his hometown for Delhi, passing out of the city’s only postcolonial institution, the Rabindra Bharati University, a new experiential reality dawned upon him. He observes, “Artists, away from Calcutta are more exposed to seminars and the global phenomenon. Consequently, their art is subject to constant attacks and challenges, and, tends to be more dynamic in growth. This creates a stark difference between people’s approach to art away from Bengal and therein, where art is restricted to a more compliant stand and limited to clichéd statements such as ‘Isn’t it beautiful?” There is undoubtedly stagnation in his hometown that eventually led to an existential crisis. A creative energy cannot remain meek to such a situation. An indomitable fortitude whets up his appetite to explode. The canvas becomes his weapon. His art becomes a reaction to his revolutionary activity – an act of   deliberate denial – an answer to shun all stagnation in a moribund society.  Vinayak asserts, “My outlook was always ‘graphical’. I have never led an abstract life.” Needless to say, this perception of life finally made it mandatory for him to take up Hyperrealism. He could not possibly have chosen abstraction.