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| VISIBLE INVISIBILITIES - a concept note |
Oindrilla Maity
Curator/ Art Historian, Calcutta
April 2008
The ambiguity of the title/phrase perhaps hints at the concept of the show quite tellingly. Although based on ‘Hyperrealism’, the splinter movement that emerged out of Photo-realism in the West, the initial problem to situate the Indian artists within the locus of such an attribute is quite crucial. For, Hyperrealism, in the Indian context did not evolve as a movement in this country, as it was in the West. It is more of a product of Academic realism - our colonial education in visually training the eye. Its last reluctant remnants continue to dwell with us. Moreover, many a times, the two artists in discourse moved away from the basic tenets of Hyperrealism, unlike their Western counterparts. Yet, in doing so, they have outnumbered such discrepancies with what they have in common with the Hyper realists, and thereby, however broadly it may be, earned for themselves such an attribute. This show is predominantly focused on two painters – Anjaneyulu G and Vinayak Bhattacharya, cutting across boundaries (no matter how meager the geographical distance between the two of them is) – from virtually two terminal points across India. Anjaneyulu G is from Hyderabad, while Vinayak Bhattacharya is from Calcutta (as well as Delhi); needless to say, each of the two artists differ largely from one another, owing to their undergoing individual schooling, diverse social and political experiences, differing conspicuously in terms of ideologies, personalities, and consequently, their individual psyche.
Emerging out of stunning visual impacts, though, the core idea of the show is to explore what nuances, diversities, and variegation involve such a practice; what lies beyond the apparent state of such a mode of painting.
The images painted by the two artists are, undoubtedly ‘visible’ before our eyes. We can feel their tactility; we can virtually smell them. And yet, what remain apparently invisible, – beyond the canvases – are a large number of facts that need to be taken into account: the philosophy out of which these images are produced; why the artist chooses ‘Hyper realism’ (as opposed to ‘Abstraction’)? Why he marries his technique to the objects rendered? Why does he produce what he does? Is it a willful attack on the prevalent art practices? If human behavior is treated as, in the main, determined by the institutions, and the structure of the society, what intrigues the artist to switch over to such a mode of expression, which happens to be a rather recent phenomenon in Indian contemporary art practices (for, undoubtedly, Hyper realism is the ‘in’ thing now)?* Or, is it under sheer economic constraints that one feels compelled to produce works of art as a consequence of the so-called ‘market forces’? Does it then, have its roots in the materiality of social existence? (The following article titled ‘Visible Discrepancies: A Dichotomy in Ways of Seeing’, is an endeavor to answer these queries.)
In a word, this is an attempt to find out the objective relations in a society which constitute/mold the artist to produce in the way he does; and to trace the ideological moorings of the current trend of expression – all of which apparently remain behind the scene and yet are decisively seminal in shaping an artist and his modus operandi. Thus, once again, this curatorial venture is to move farther and delve into some kind of trans-substantiation, of which, the paintings emerge out.
*(Based on a survey on the galleries since 2004) |
