If a show of emerging artists could be impulsive, vivid, created with a quick, sure, intense touch, Gallery Espace’s “Going, Going, Gone” has the spontaneity, the emotional honesty, the immediacy, the dramatic directness and idiosyncrasy we have come to expect from contemporary art. The title, taken from Bob Dylan’s famed song, has many contexts to create in terms of a group of emerging artists’ urban testimonies.
Abstract paintings, “photo-realist” prints, installations, paperwork and photographs — and the contemporary reality of the theme becomes director Renu Modi’s desire to create a corollary in context with an eye cocked on the viewers. With images floating around you, the interiors of Gallery Espace are tranquil and inviting. The first work on the left as you enter is Ajay Kanwal’s interactive work fashioned out of canvas, ghungroos (dancing bells) and infra-red sensors, titled One Step=8,000 Replies.
Ajay Singh Kanwal plays with the idea of “illusion” in his work which has two wooden boxes wrapped in white canvas and intriguing is the counterpoint he creates with the tied ghunguroos. The boxes have an electronic motor inside and when a viewer puts a step forward, the electronic sensors in the work capture it and the wooden boxes start vibrating.
“My interest has always been in exploring how to stretch the limits of the medium I use in my sculptures to present new ways of seeing the real world to the viewer. So my work is ‘realistic’ but my approach to it via the medium used offers several new and interesting perspectives,” states Kanwal. “It is based on the old philosophy that when you want something and make an effort, the entire universe comes together to help you. But what is universe? It’s an illusion,” says Baroda-based Kanwal who teaches at the Faculty of Arts at M.S. University.
The painterly handling of abstract artist Sharad Sonkusale conveys a certain joie de vivre, even when it is softened with dulcet directions. It is an abstract expressionist painting in all but name. However, much the gentle colourative gestures can be read as dancing notations. One can feel the lyricism in the paint, sense the mendicant movement of the ruminations, read their energy as emotional expression.
Then, there is the in-your-face visceral expressionism of sculptor Kanta Kishore Moharana. His Headlines Today reflects the gun-toting terrorist-driven world that is reckless, seemingly styleless, and even chaotic in its handling by the centre. Agitated by the negative news “almost celebrated in newspapers”, Bhubaneswar-based Moharana has been creating newspaper sculptures in marble for the last 10 years, but he gives them a positive makeover. “In the newspaper titled Headlines Today the headline reads, ‘Let us Fight Terrorism’ instead of saying so many people got killed in this place. It’s all engraved while the gun, which has been stuck to it with gum, has been created in bronze.” The work hints at the impact urban paradigms have on the state of the human psyche.
Lots of questions arise out of this showing. Is Smriti Dixit’s work veering more towards craft rather than art? While the flowers and other creations speak another language, you know she wanted to give them stylistic shape, keep them at a certain aesthetic distance, under aesthetic control, rather than let them take the intimate shape their intensity has to take to make itself felt, to stir the viewer to his or her unsuspected depths.
But, in comparison to other works, it seems as if she remains bound by the demands of external necessity — stylistic propriety, aesthetic good manners, representational demands, preconceptions of production rather than expression.
While we have moved away form what is understood as instinctive painting, this show of emerging artists boldly breaks the rules of form with its inspired formlessness, and what endures is the abstract dynamics that tends to disfigure the figure by exaggerating its vitality. But paintings are much more instinctive — inherently dynamic — and emotionally forthcoming. They are even more uncannily abstract, if the abstract conveys what Kandinsky called inner necessity better than the representational, as he suggested.
In that context, Vinita Khanna’s artistic input from plastic creates a notational basis and a comment on cultural dynamics. Vinita Khanna’s translucent blooms, created from found material, remind one of human interventions in the natural eco-system. The material becomes the medium and has about it an eco-sensory aesthetic even as it throws up issues of man’s inherent exploitation and arrogance about dumping plastic on Mother Earth. Shubha Taparia’s photo-realistic works showcase the co-existence of two streams of life: pavement squatters against the high-end global luxurious brands at the famous Taj Hotel in Mumbai.
Director Renu Modi says: “Gallery Espace has chosen to show ‘Going, Going, Gone’ at a juncture when the second decade of the (once) new century has dawned. All around, there is a palpable sense of fast-paced change that dislocates our living present. We are aware of the fragility of our world, but it’s hard to face it. Art brings out our inner thoughts, compelling us to confront what we sense.”
Modi excels as an insightful curator who wants to go beyond the obvious.