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Outside In: The paintings
of Dhruvi Acharya
Since leaving Bombay and her training in illustration
for an MFA program in the US, 29-year old Dhruvi Acharya
has charted her journey towards self-definition in richly
colored paintings packed with graphic imagery and decorative
effects. Striving for and often achieving lyricism, her
works can be sentimental. But as she surrenders a will
to resolve her pictures prematurely, she makes ever more
witty and touching comments about what can be learned
in transit. And offers encouraging evidence of the imaginative
resources she possesses and has still to plumb.
Ms Acharya's first body of work exhibited in 1999 merged
formal principles shared by classical Indian art and commercial
illustration to explore her cultural roots and make a
metaphor of her particular experience. The pizzicato memory
images in A Life Divided (1997), Moist Earth, Paths from
the Past (1998), and In My Room (1998) suggest the time-dimmed
forms of cave paintings, or more playfully, the dispersed
props of a passionate child's sprawling game of make believe.
Invoking the artist's longing effort and her limited success
at remaking a whole, a self, from these scattered experiences,
the pictures also effectively register that familiar paradox
of nostalgia. From a distance, home is more vivid, less
tangible.
And increasingly uninhabitable. Craning birds in flight
and upturned trees represent the urgency of the artist's
homeward gaze and the desire for greater personal freedom
that impelled her departure. A blue pool sprouting hot
pink lotuses, borrowed from Kangra miniatures of romantic
longing, identifies India as the wellspring of her imagination.
A moveable oasis, now; but shoreless, and thus disconcertingly
less fathomable. In more recent works she has probed what
makes return difficult. On the screaming red ground of
I-Screen (1999), a sharp edged grater makes a shoddy filter
and nadequate shield in a familiar war of words between
two women.
As consolation for pain and disorientation, Ms. Acharya's
paintings offer order and beauty, classical culture and
commercial art's common cause. But her works can falter
over her pursuit of this very goal. Her symbols, aiming
for communicative clarity, can be conventional. And when
she does not develop a divergent context to propel them
beyond given meanings, she blunts her exploration of emotional
imbalance and ambivalent feeling. Her bifurcated or figurally
hierarchicized compositions can be static. When combined
with elegant linear rhythms and pretty color harmonies,
as in Birth (2000) and April 2000 (2000), her figures
suspended in a moment of emotional indecision seem merely
passive, her theme solipsistic.
But Ms. Acharya is an artist who recognizes the shortcomings
of a chosen route and seeks new strategies to lead herself
beyond its dead ends. Since late 1999 she has tapped her
own capacities for satire, the common thread
amongst a varied group of artists who have attracted her
attention. She's pointed out the impact of Lari Pittman's
layered surfaces, the excess of imagination in Hieronymous
Bosch, Jean-Michel Basquiat's spontaneity, Francis Bacon's
"elegant way of painting the grotesque", Pieter
Brueghal's precise observation of life around him, amongst
others. She's acknowledged her affinity for the work of
Nilima Sheikh and Nalini Malani. By re-engaging some of
commercial art's original gifts to high culture - celebration
of unreason, superfluity, appetitive demand that is as
insistent as it is fleeting - she has unburdened her symbols.
Recently, she has taken more inspiration from cartooning's
ironic use of clarity to defuse what's mystifying.
Dharamsala (1999) finds a way out of her ego's imprisoning
self-obsessions through its humorous undertones. Reflecting
on her exploration of Buddhism, a lively zigzag composition
and warm hues creates a sense of frenetic energy and reverence
as one of two round-bottomed monks attending an ashen
woman eyeballs a young woman seated across the canvas.
Wavering lines like unruly hairs or frazzled thoughts
emanate from her head. Her form echoes, seeming to contemplate,
a bulbous bodied woman sitting fixed or full of potential
in meditation to the right above. With the artist, we
are left to wonder whether she has achieved the higher
state of consciousness she aims for, or threatens to fly
away - or pop - like an over-inflated balloon.
Watching (1999), one of Ms. Acharya's best paintings,
blends the quotidian and supernatural, high thought and
common sense to reveal what may be learned when one submits
to the contradictions a day will deliver (and life's disregard
for our efforts to make sense of them). With deadpan,
dead-on comic style, she pictures herself munching a snack,
watching tv - modernity's own means of emptying the self.
Four-armed Krishna at her side gesticulates as if commenting
on the evening drama's latest development; his (un)remarkable
presence offers reassurance that home is always with her.
But Watching also light-handedly invokes the Bhagavad
Gita. In this struggle to locate and identify oneself
between possible homes and possible selves, Arjuna's chariot
is a worn and cozy sofa and the battlefield of Kurukshetra
is a wall-less living room that the world casually crashes.
Her figure's seeming passivity a sign of her receptive
state, Watching ponders whether identity may be something
more likely to be found than constructed, more received
than researchable. With a knowing laugh, the picture recommends
that she accept identity's arbitrariness, its necessity
and her own absurdity.
Ms. Acharya's newest works, reflecting on her relationships
to people at home, approach the idea of the externally
determined self from another angle. Reusing a familiar
layout, a large central figure sits amidst a swirl of
choices, memories, and talking heads in Saturday Night
(2000) and Uma (2000). But here the surfaces buzz with
decoration, offering something more akin to visual gossip
than elaborating gloss. For like gossip, whose compelling
embellishments enable it to replace the original story,
the varied, pleasing patterns of florals, dots and lozenges
on party pastel grounds contradict, indeed overwhelm the
dramas of inner conflict. This is more than content giving
way to pretty effects. Her stilled, almost vacuous figures
held captive by or reflecting the profuse surface activity
invoke the dilemma of being a social creature, part of
a social fabric, dependent on and attached to the conventions
and demands of love that have shaped her despite her desire
to shape herself. The gaps and coincidences between the
figures and forms embody the pleasures and limits of having
to approach and articulate herself through words and images
- those social forms whose usage always precedes and exceeds
us, that make communication possible but that also always
place us at a remove from ourselves.
If her journey is familiar and her focus still narrowly
(personally) defined, Ms. Acharya demonstrates significant
potential. Her sophisticated use of beauty as a counterpoint
not only makes a strong suit of an earlier source of
weakness. These paintings suggest that she appreciates
the under-acknowledged power of the decorative in art:
a humble schematization of reality, ornament's transcendent
beauty is also imagination's brazen offer to replace or
recreate what reality cannot resolve, or wholly reintegrate.
What might she gain now by examining the works and ideas
of K.G. Subramanyan, or Arpita Singh's use of the decorative
in her intensely personal and historically engaged pictures?
Brave enough to rethink the modern chestnut that equates
self-definition with rebellious self-assertion, Ms. Acharya
deserves the attention that will encourage her to continue
to transform a once sentimental longing for an irrecoverable
past into a mature embrace of home, in the broadest sense,
the original and necessarily conflicted site of an enabling
and engaged imagination.
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