Moods of a metropolis
The younger artists today are contending with post-globalised urbanism and all the socio-economic and political agendas embedded in this. There is a discourse of convergence on the Metropolis rather than a discourse of alterity in their works, as is clear from the recent show ‘Subliminal Metropolis’ at Laltitude 28 that displays the works of artists Shanthamani M and Preksha Tater from India and Julien Segard from France.
The exhibition explores different ways of representing architectural spaces — urban or psychological, in temporally and spatially ambivalent settings. The works of the artists use geometrical architecture and an organising grid that can be played with: deconstructed, de-contextualised and formulated into new equations representing the state of being and the world. Shanthamani deconstructs city spaces set in antiquity through her sculptural installations made of massive charcoal pillars.
The use of diverse chemicals has been experimented with in Segard’s creations, which use oil, watercolour and recycled materials on paper, metal, wood and wall to tell a story about the cities. The most painterly of all works is the Falimente series that shows closed exteriors of shops, decrepit and decaying, a sign of our times. In other paintings, the starting point is satellite imagery of different cities in France and India that he reconstructs as urban spaces with individual narratives.
Space, as a metaphor, recurs in Preksha’s works. Often, structures are shown in relation with a human figure; clinging to a crack in the structure, climbing it, reclining/lying/dead against the same. The Metropolis in her works is symbolised by a solid wall, an incomplete structure against which human will is in a state of resistance. Her style is minimalist in terms of colour, treatment and composition, with a single aluminum figure juxtaposed against a textured canvas prepared with different mediums.
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