|
A Story Teller’s Cellar
At a time when artists are, without hierarchy, employing
every possible medium from pencil to pixel, contemporary
painting has reinvented itself in dialogue with the changing
crop of ‘neo’ practices and the shifting logic
of the seasonal avant-garde. Traditional boundaries of
representation and abstraction have been wrecked, letting
in fresh possibilities of the decorative arts, kitsch,
pop and folk art, illustration, mythology and other neglected
mineshafts of the general culture like the world of caricatures.
Artists today mix the straightforward with the ironic,
ironing out high art infections with low art remedies.
Upper-case themes find lower-case renditions making much
of the art fat-free, efficacious, provocative and pleasurable.
Dhruvi Acharya, like many young artists of her generation,
remains alert to the manifold
choices available to a contemporary artist. If the self
engrossed tone and content of her work, which traffic
in broad themes of introspection and self- analysis, at
times stand the risk of dipping into melancholia; the
homogenous content is cleverly arm-twisted by a refreshing
range of stylistic references and demystifying methods.
The use of unlikely, bright, candy colours to explore
sepia-toned, contemplative themes is one such departure
from the conventional argot of the atelier. Acharya’s
graceful paintings bear affinity with sources as diverse
as the sexually and politically charged paintings of Lari
Pittman, the elegant folios of the Indian miniatures,
the florid-morbid imagery of Frida Kahlo, the goofy grin-girls
of Takashi Murakami and the baroque surfaces of Gustav
Klimt and other Jugendstil practitioners. She consciously
skips the mimetic possibilities of representational painting,
and instead settles for a flat and stylized rendition;
her unique, painterly language becomes a rich dialect
of sources spread across historical time and geographical
locations.
Day Dreamer’s Nightmare
Dhruvi Acharya’s recent suite of drawings and paintings
collectively titled ‘Figment’ foregrounds the
solitary female figure. Such existentialist isolation
of the figure is a sharp departure from the tenor of her
previous works where the paintings were often teeming
with people. Playing the protagonist, they appear in several
avatars: the diminutive girl child, the burdened mother,
the reluctant poetess or the urban goddess in disguise.
However, the one common element they all seem to share
is that they attempt to communicate with their viewer,
a complex psychodrama in mute. The hi–pitch of happiness
or the dipped tone of distress, are wired through tight-lipped
commentaries; the paintings appear like hard copies of
a silent soliloquy.
In Acharya’s oeuvre, the vacant postures and deadpan
gestures of the tragedienne/ comedienne somehow seem to
convey labyrinthine stories that are delivered through
well considered silences and ellipses. Her taciturn figures,
often bearing empty speech bubbles, are surrounded by
an earsplitting concentration of motifs and metaphors
that form the codified proscenium within which the women
conduct their low intensity performance. The brimming
backdrops are packed to carrying capacity; images are
closely juxtaposed or oftentimes overlaid like a translucent
palimpsest leading to a synchronic build up of stories.
The sleek surfaces offer bleak panoramas throwing up a
range of varied objects or images: sharp alligator clips,
carnivorous foliage, paper clouds dripping teardrops,
et cetera. This chock-a-block repetition of images throughout
her paintings, make them appear like anecdotes where each
line is loaded with alliterations. The female figure becomes
the seed around which Acharya chooses to harvest her discreetly
feminine fables of the futility and fatality of human
experience, notes on missed carnivals and tales of daily
rituals.
Even though the formal structure and painterly ciphers
are suspended in a complex rhizome-like network, the overall
effect is effervescent and deliberately ‘lite’.
There’s nothing explicit about Acharya’s pictures
and the imagery remains intentionally inadmissible. However
it is through sheer pictorial inventiveness and visual
persuasion that she provokes her viewers to play detective
and speculate about the history and circumstances these
enigmatic figures may inhabit. Going by their attire the
women in Acharya’s work appear urban and would share
the same generation as her. This perhaps is a conscious
choice as it compels the viewer to think of them as self-images
or as tangential alter egos. What is interesting is that
Acharya generates a sense of the autobiographical without
having to precisely spell out the self-image with direct
suggestions. Her narratives of family life and the surface
undulations of relationships are conveyed without the
prosaic domestic moment becoming the key reference document
of her work. Even in works such as ‘Paint’,
where the ‘woman as artist’ is seen blankly
staring at an empty canvas, or in another instance such
as the painting titled ‘Mother’, it is the universal
tales of the creative act or notions of maternal sacrifice
that take precedence over the fact that Dhruvi’s
own life is a consistent jugglery of her roles as mother
and artist; as someone trying to inhabit the divide between
the domestic and the fantastic.
Even as they appear like tender narratives of female subjectivity,
the drawings and paintings in ‘Figment’ are
not an overt or covert commentary on gender disparity
and no opinion on women’s rights are registered here.
Delivered through calculated doses of the burlesque, the
grotesque and the arabesque, these are stories of each
human being caught between the daydream of hope and the
nightmare of reality.
Jitish Kallat
Mumbai, Nov 2004
(Jitish Kallat is a Mumbai based artist who frequently
writes on art)
|
