“If you can’t read or write, you are illiterate, similarly if you look at an artwork and can’t understand anything, you are illiterate too,” says artist Akbar Padamsee, whose new show of oil paintings and lithographs is opening today at the Pundole Art Gallery. At 88, Akbar sits resolutely in the gallery, explaining how art has to be understood not just through its “visual appeal” that forms its outer structure, but also through what lies beneath (the inner structure) and the space between the two.
“One needs to look at the precise lines, the angles at which they intersect to form different spaces on the canvas and how it’s organised: vertically or horizontally. It’s like a musical score. Everything has to be in order, and organised in time and space. Just like notes, an artist has to be precise with his strokes or else there is no harmony. And this is what makes an artwork extraordinary,” says Mr Padamsee.
On display are human “heads” — angry, peaceful, thoughtful, shy, dreaming, old, young, men and women — each one portraying a different emotion. The aim, as Mr Padamsee says, was to search for “a look, a gaze, an expression, a stance and a placement” and share the thrill of finding it with the viewers.
He speaks of this process as that of acceptance and denial. “Every choice which I made (be it selecting the nose, the eyes or any other feature) is also at the same time a denial of a hundred other possibilities. However, each time, without fail, the consequent image is a surprise to me — making me wonder if I am indeed the author of the image, or just a participant in the event. And it is this thrill that makes me come back to this theme again and again,” says Mr Padamsee.
And as the viewer progresses through the heads, in a never-ending search which began with the artist, he transcends naturally on to the onlooker, his efforts condensed to only one purpose: Look for the gaze that would appeal to the inner self.
Most of the heads on display at the gallery were made during the artist’s stay at the Isha Yoga Centre in Coimbatore, in a studio surrounded by thousands of coconut trees. Perhaps it’s the sheer composure, peace and stillness of the surrounding that renders these heads a certain calmness to their anger and a resolute stillness to their sadness.
The artwork, as Mr Padamsee mentions, demontrates the infinite possibilities which nature has to offer and in Leonardo Da Vinci’s words, “experience has never demonstrated”. “It’s not possible to ever exhaust all possibilities of imaging the human head — they all look similar and yet so dissimilar from each other,” says Mr Padamsee adding, “The human face gives one an identity. It tells you who you are, that you are still here. Imagine if you didn’t know how you look like, what would have been your existence?”
But the infiniteness that the human face offered gave Mr Padamsee a challenge to capture the real essence of the eyes. He says, “The eyes are the most challenging aspect of a human face. The way they look tells you all about the person. If you are lying, your eyes say it all. And even when they are closed, they express a lot. It lets you look into the person through the fake outer shell which he has created to hide the real self.”
And to call these heads portraits would be wrong because Mr Padamsee didn’t stick to one person as his muse: “There are bits taken from different people. While some made to the canvas as noses, others inspired the forehead and some others are there just as the eyes,” says the artist. And you can’t call them a figment of his imagination either. “They are not real people, but everything about these heads is real. The forehead, lips, nose, eyes, cheeks, everything is real,” he adds.