Could an artist create three charcoal works born of an academic tradition without being academic? At the India Art Summit, Gallerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke will have three works by Indian artist V.N.Aji, where he has worked from a figurative perspective of the value and perfection of the human anatomy as the model. Imagine charcoals with the delicacy of tone, a vapoury stillness born of a moonlit night, and the texture of marbled magnificence. How can an artist continue to approach the male/female nude both expressionistically and abstractly, giving the human body a poetic yet rough hewn elusive life of its own while turning it into a play of lithe limbs and line?
These are challenging works. The three works can seem either entirely aware of being looked at or entirely absorbed in a movement or mood. Although they are nude and gentle in tone, they seem neither naked nor exposed. They are isolated and iconic in the vast blank space of the characteristic coloured paper that Aji works on; the quality of this coloured paper being as dense as the space in a cubist or classic painting.
These three images that seem to stand like Three Graces are charismatic, curious and searching, yet they radiate an emotive essence of non-chalant ease. But in their comfort, lies a mystic mood, a meditative stance that harks back to the sages of yore, the nomads of the mountains who live on a diet of chants and the berries of the bush.
Questions stumble and chase each other as you look at the three works and concentrate on the braided, luxuriant hair nestled atop their heads. What is it about the manner, in which the hair is tumbled or piled on the heads of these three studies? Is it a chance to embellish, to decorate or to be optimistic/stylised?’’ Here human hair is more than mere scaffolding. Hair in its fascinating fantasia becomes metaphorical. And the colour of the skin, in its earthy Dravidian hue, makes us aware of the metaphorical nature of charcoal when it transcends from a decorative drawing into an architectural articulation. From the virginal visitations on a page, a heady charcoal articulates the physicality of form. This means that a charcoal should be democratic in the creation of a drawing, it must dictate its own firmament, and the less object-oriented and the less narrative a drawing is, the better. A charcoal must leave behind its degree of diminishing derivativeness and take on a trajectory of density. And in that ultimate accumulation of decisions and divisions, the tactile ability to create a subliminal essence, gives it a penetrating probing power.
In many ways in his quest for the expressionist realism, Aji has stumbled into the nuances of an abstracted space that flew through cubism. But there is a rare urgency of intent. And it would not be wrong to say that part of their urgency comes from their relationship to photography in the artist’s inner eye.
Aji’s feeling for line and light is reminiscent of photographs by Man Ray and other Surrealists; so is the way some figures suggest negatives. The manner in which he illuminate the face of the woman, youthful yet ageless in her tall tumbling of tresses and her right and left arm resting aside her, all that shows how perfectly manicured her gestures are. The two monk like men, however, are a total contrast. While one is pot bellied and rotund, the second is angular and skeletal like.
The thin ascetic looking monk’s right hand held in the Buddhis t mudra, is akin to the suggestion of transcendence as well as the approach of awareness. Sometimes the expression on the thin man’s face is wizened, sometimes withdrawn. The fat figure, on the other hand, is in no way stiff, in fact it’s comfortable with his weight and rather languid.
One essential element in these three works is the ephemeral quality of light. It falls on the bodies in different ways, sometimes spotlighting the face from above, sometimes hitting a nude from below — like stage lights illuminating a singer or dancer.
Sometimes, light and shadow seem to be fighting over the figure. But, howsoever intense the struggle may be, the effect of the mutations of light and shade are magical and lyrical.
Another essential element is the depth and density of line. Aji uses the density of charcoal current to create a rising up through the shoulder and neck to the tangled tresses, and then thins out in such a way that we can almost watch the line secure the head in place. The outlines of the bodies are mesmerising as if in a soft powered motion, making the space of paper between the legs, alongside the stomach and thighs, and indeed around the entire figures active.
In short, Aji makes the language of drawing come alive, continually in the process of deciding and changing his mind even as we observe. Line and light appear to function independently of both the artist and the figure, although they are never in conflict with either, but finding each other’s depth in the quest for its own identity. The last facet to be studied is the feet. It’s intriguing how the feet mirror the age of the study.
The three ascetic images have different ages in the voyage of discovery. It’s not easy to create feet that stand on the gravel like terrain, and have distinctive nails and characteristic contours of feminine as well as masculine tropes.
When you look at the three works as a trinity of tensile trajectory, you wonder at the ability of the artist to strike a verisimilitude that hovers between photography and scientific notation.
Astonishing in its intrinsic details, these works challenge the human eye to decipher the creation even as it grips your gaze. Artist and articulation, human figure and drawing, each element has an equivocal poise. These works will herald the range and reach of the sealed and incurious finality that makes academic art a study of infinite inspiration.