Review of Rajendra Dhawan's show

Untitled Oil on canvas 26 x 32" 2011

[This was a difficult piece to write; those days i was editing Art&Deal and had stepped up to write this review. Realized Dhawan's paintings were not only about re presenting, but also about 'seeing'. To be able to undersand that zone of 'seeing'  took up a project to click 200 pictures of my small room in Kolkata - only then i could write. ]

It is (maybe) only in abstract painting that post colonial Indian art has reached heights that transcend its own post coloniality, and stakes claim to an easy dialogue with the mainstream of global painting. Maybe it’s the absence of content that enables it to bypass the otherwise marginality of post independence Indian painting.  When one walked up the steps of gallery threshold to see Rajendra Dhawan’s solo, one simply got transported from the busy simultaneous exhibition openings in the narrow lanes of Lado Sarai, and got transported into a quaint European museum. Even in the opening crowd there was silence. There was some mild chitter-chatter but…everyone was looking at the paintings, and exchanging joys in whispers.  It is as if the chatterati had unknowingly stepped into a chapel.

Each work invited you to spend some time and gaze…and in the oil washes, transparent hues of blues, browns and reds- one has hardly ever come across such minimal surface building, and yet, one is able to see the artist managing to create such vast depths within the canvas. Slowly it dawns on you that these may be landscapes. Before you know it, they appear…and then disappear again.

They say the sight of Rajendra Dhawan gazing away at a Gaitonde painting, deeply lost in thought, is one of the most poignant moments of Indian art history. Last month,  on some afternoons, one could see Raza sitting in front of Dhawan’s paintings, deeply engrossed and completely oblivious to the world. If one has to situate Dhawan within the practice of abstraction, it becomes clear that he is one of the masters of the rare genre of master landscape-abstractionists. Ramkumar and Padamsee are other artists who also come to mind. Except for Raza, the above mentioned names  have been seminal is showing a direction in abstraction which is just surface building, not geometric, not neo tantric, working within the zones of mindscapes and landscapes.

Untitled Oil on canvas 32 x 39" 2011

Of course a show like this could not be seen at the opening, so one had to come back again and again. With the changing direction and intensity of light, the hues would change meanings. (This show must have been very difficult to light). These changing hues brought one closer to imagining these as landscapes, gently changing mood as clouds drift by. As the landscapes disappear and the painting reappears in its pure formalism one can see influences from Rothko and Rauschenberg, especially in the dialogues between silence and movement. However, one hardly ever gets to see such Zen -like minimalism…many parts of the canvas are simply left untouched, and some parts are brilliantly under-painted with single layers of very dilute colours and dry brushes. Yet, areas of his canvasses are deeply opaque…violent and scarred. In this viewer, it brought back memories of all the wounds that we constantly inflict on the earth or the deep scars that rest in our psyche.

Dhawan’s work seek a balance between the referential and formless, and to achieve such, he works with the compositional divisions of space, and the flow of color tones on the canvas. These become the tools with which the artist hides and yet reveals referentiality.  One may see endless fields in the dark blue of dusk, or deep forests in moonlight or one may simply change the gaze, and get engrossed in the formal harmonies, the deliberate noise, hieroglyphic scratchings and the play of dark and light.

Untitled Oil on canvas 13 x 16" 2011

In Dhawan’s artistic practice, there is a certain opposition to the post modern with the spectacular image. As one of the founding members of the ‘Unknown Group’, and through his teaching practice in Belgrade, Dhawan has been a part of resistance movements which nurtured  painterly abstraction in post modern Europe.  The paintings offer us a space to rest our eyes, and in them, there is enough chaos to stir our souls. In this age of visual bombardment… images are designed to jump at you, craving for that attention that bounces off into the recesses of your overfed conscious. This life, lived in an overdose of spectacles has numbed our senses for ever. When we travel we are busy clicking and hardly ever just seeing. Our eyes cannot rest, and are constantly  bored. In these times Dhawan offers us a different mode of seeing. This mode of seeing is not only operational in the viewer, but has had to be first digested by the artist. It’s the quaint silence of a tranquil mind, etched with pain.


venue - gallery threshold
written for Art&Deal Magazine
Rahul Bhattacharya on Sunday, 11 December 2011 at 05:03