Painting the changing canvas

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For someone growing up in the midst of nature — surrounded by lovely hills, dense forests, cultivated lands and beautiful riverbeds — a changing skyline characterised by an endless sea of grey buildings and an ever increasingly smoky, polluted sky can be quite a contrast, especially when you see this change every day from the 10th floor of your office. For Baroda-based artist Alok Bal, this is the sad reality.

Born in Orissa, Alok moved to Baroda to pursue a degree in painting from M.S. University. Ever since, he has shown great sensitivity to the changing urban landscape in his paintings. The contrast in topography from his native Orissa to the fast-developing city of Baroda cannot be ignored in his work.
In a solo show titled Ember, Latitude 28 features nearly 45 works of Bal, all of which the 43-year-old artist has experimented on a different medium, including canvas, paper, wood and glass, using discarded materials like used cloth, plastic, medicine wrappers, pipes etc.
Why the name Ember, and Bal replies, “My show is about the subject of human suffering, which is caused by the corrupt socio-political system. Also the system which we create within ourselves results in more suffering. The result is an imbalance in our inner and outer selves which leads us finally towards destruction.”
The art gallery has had a long association with Bal, spanning almost a decade. Given the dynamics of the artist’s body of works, they couldn’t help but organise a solo show. “This show comes after a gap of six years since Bal last had a solo exhibition in Delhi (Black Landscape, 2007) and his oeuvre has become even more fascinating since then. While his paintings are serene and metaphorical, his works in waste material, wooden box and glass show his versatility in handling various mediums,” says Latitude 28 director Bhavna Kakkar.
The metaphorical usage of serene colours, flying dainty figures, scratches, the burden a man carries, shrubs growing carelessly inside houses, animals trapped inside thorns are all motifs stitched together with skill. Bal’s works are replete with barren landscapes and endless vistas of grey-blacks except a solitary structure or two. Even though each of his works tells a distressing tale of rampant urbanisation, he prefers to keep his works untitled.
“I sometimes don’t want to give any name to my work. I want them to be interpreted as they are looked at and not by the titles they have,” he says.
At the very onset of his career, one could see the influence of British and American pop art in his works, but since then he has found an idiom that is very much his own. His works represent man’s innate instinct to dominate nature and he uses both irony and skill to express his fascination and disillusionment with life in a metropolis. “The main inspiration is my surroundings, people, life, nature and, of course, my inner self,” he says, “and like my previous body of work, this show, too, is about cityscapes, but with a difference. Previously I would focus on the exterior, but this time I have tried to get into the interior, the more psychological aspects of life of the urban people.”
Apart from his passion of art, Bal is a nature lover and avid trekker, who loves trekking in the forests of Gujarat. He extends the “environment versus development” debate to reveal his concerns for the changing behaviour and lifestyle of the human race as well as the effects on birds and animals. In an earlier series of graphite on paper, he paid ode to common birds, like sparrows, that are becoming extinct from our immediate environment because of pollution and disappearing foliage. “I feel lucky if I see a bird outside my window these days,” he rues. No wonder that he paints an unsettling picture of natural habitats being replaced by concrete jungles and the human tendency to tame nature in all its forms.
Bal also reveals that as a child he wanted to become a football player, but some injuries sealed his dream. So he chose the canvas to show his skills. His love for football, however, has remained intact. In fact, he opted to capture the spirit of the game on canvas, treating it as just another playing field, in a 2006 series titled Football Fever. Bal also started a local football academy in 2007 in Baroda called XYZ Football Club, a vibrant group of young football enthusiasts. “I have been playing football since my childhood. Football is a beautiful game. It’s a way of life. It’s not just a sport for me, it’s a philosophy, and every sportsman is a philosopher,” he signs off.
The show will conclude on May 20 and is open to the public from 11 am to 7 pm.