Drawing is one of the most fundamental forms of artistic expression. The mesmerising drawings from the caves of Lascaux and elsewhere in Europe provide some of the best evidence of the timeless compulsion to make pictures with outline, yet beyond those cave pictures, it is much harder to conjure up in the mind’s eye accomplished instances of draftsmanship before the period known as the Italian Renaissance. At that moment, of course, drawing seems to take on new significance.
The sixteenth-century artist and historian Giorgio Vasari articulates in his multi-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architectsa: Drawing, better than any other technique, offers access to the artist’s thought processes. Indeed, when looking at the marvellous sketches by Leonardo da Vinci we feel that we gain a privileged glimpse into the mind of this intriguing genius. Vasari describes the way in which drawings were valuable and collectible demonstrations of the artist’s skill.
Few galleries in India concentrate on the power of paper. And when a stalwart gallery like Vadehra puts together a “Paper Trail” it needs to be investigated. A sheet of paper has a strange beauty that is born of disintegration. Population haemorrhage, dry fiscal pockets and defunct industry leave their scars as weathered spaces where vines and leaves of thought mingle with the aged patina of paper.
The show chronicles the paper phenomenon, in a small way. Charcoal makes a warm timbered tenor. While Ram Kumar is strident in his pursuit of the human portrait, Ganesh Pyne’s weather-bitten, images are monotone and brooding. Elevated contours of character run carelessly through the fields of Jogen Choudhury’s thought: Slicks of intent cover his image where human angst is shown clear-felled, the land of gesture blemished and washed-out.
The most poignant part of this show lies in the etchings of Arpita Singh, inviting the reader to speculate on what came before and what will come after. One is reminded of the poet Robert Williams Parry who wrote: “Y mae lleisiau a drychiolaethau ar hyd lie (There are voices and phantoms throughout the place)”.
This idea, that paper can retain small pieces of history in suspension, where time teeters on an edge, is taken to soaring strength in this show. Ganesh Pyne’s works have character and charisma. Pyne portrays a melancholy state where annihilation and death are constant bystanders. The palette is subtle and luminous and the compositions show the enigmatic emergence of human figures, animal forms and natural objects in a crepuscular light. One can recognise in this chiaroscuro the contours of a dream which may only be a way of expressing the angst of modern life.
All the archetypal signs of the Indian dream are there in the works of Jogen. His figures appear through a thick black backdrop that do not allow for identifying features of time or place, in stylised forms that are uniquely his own, their bodies sagging and mutating like the vegetal tendrils that he also paints. Torsos, heads, hands and breasts, everything carries the imprint of autumnal maturity, even a sense of ripeness turning into an intimation of decay and transience... Jogen’s figures sometimes slump like an exhausted animal or splay out like a squashed frog while they remain fully alive... it gives these figures a comical edge, a certain humour and if only occasionally, also the teeth of biting satire.
Jogen’s seemingly out of control outlines that enclose mottled areas of mouldering flesh etched in a spidery networks of cross-hatched lines and his bodies that bloat and sag as if some genetic code within them has gone mad, are not images that are easy to forget. One recalls Jogen’s words two years ago: “I had the idea that if I were portraying an Indian man I should be conscious of the fact that we Indians sit in a manner quite different from that of a European. Our bodily forms, movements and looks are very different, I sought to study this difference and bring it to my painting. This was a new point of interest for me as a revelation of the reality of the Indian form.”
And then you stop in wonder on top at a rare 1953 Raza, a face that has been set as a diagonal. One is curious about Raza’s early figurative work that reflects a close study of a personal reference, an unusual reworking of the image through a process of loose lithe lines and a hint of subtle cross-hatching, adding texture, form and volume, and simultaneously adding colour in its monochromatic tint on a newspaper. Raza’s seemingly sombre control outlines that enclose mottled areas of the face are etched in a spidery network of cross-hatched lines is an image that is indeed not easy to forget. At Defence Colony in New Delhi, this show spells vintage vitality.