“Beauty
and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great
happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death
of roses-.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise
My Bed of
Roses maps Balbir Krishan’s artistic journey since 2010. This
exhibition showcases some precious fragments from his prior body of
work, and offers glimpses towards the direction the artist is taking
in the future. Balbir is one of the few voices from within contemporary art
that dwells on the male body; universalising it, personalizing it...painting a
form that contains both the grim realities and exalted fantasies of
masculinity...a meeting place for utopia and dystopia.
When one
looks at Balbir Krishan's human forms, there is a certain Michelangelesque
understanding of the body and celebration of masculinity. Yet, when one looks
closer,his edgy masculine forms are laced with the delicate serenity that one
sees in the paintings of Ajanta and the miniatures of Kangra. This fusion of
sensibilities brings a tension to his art that suggests the point when the
erotic-the personal and the political meet. As one looks at the works and puts
them in a timeline, it becomes visible that the sculpted masculine body is
carrying signs of fragmentation, scarring and delicacy.
The turn
of the century has witnessed a radicalization or inversion of the power
equation in the dominant discourse of representation. Eroticized exhibition is not restricted to
the female body anymore, but the male body too has made its appearance in this
arena, where the male character, in a narrative, not only engenders
narcissistic identification, but also becomes an erotic spectacle and a
fetishized object.
Balbir
Krishan is known for an erotic and confrontational depiction of homoerotica.
His works are attractive and yet deeply provocative. In recent times,
intolerance towards homoerotica and any challenge to mainstream sexuality has
grown in the country. His 2011-12 exhibition‘Out Here and Now’ was vandalised by members of what may have been
the political or religious right. Yet his works have managed to find an
increasingly large audience. His use of a language, which is close to mediatic
realism, adds to the sensual
attraction of his works, taking them into a zone between the commodity and the
inconsumable.
The artist stands in the zone between craft and concept. At one point he imagines
a painting completely and then trans-creates it on paper or canvas, and at that
point it feels that the medium is almost incidental, just a mode to capture the
concept. At another level the artist's choice of medium is very conscious and
particular. He works on found paper, often pages from art catalogues, brings
out his forms through erasing and then renders them with a ball point pen. This
approach is carried out in his canvases too. Found erotic imagery from the
internet is collaged onto a canvas, forms that we see are but remnants of painted
oversurface, finished with fine skill.
As a
self-trained artist sometimes one becomes very conscious about his skill; there
is an urge to declare one's ability to paint, to conjure up forms, of being
able to re-present. Balbir has developed his own language where he builds his
forms through erasure and drawing. Technique for him is not only a mode of
representation but also a mode of physical engagement and meditation. There is
a deep engagement with physical labour that goes behind every work; hours of
erasing, over painting and fine drawing in its own way speak of the deep physicality
of sexuality- both as sexual and as cultural experiences.
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| The Woman Inside: The Fable of Shiva, Mohini and Harihar |
Thematically,
Balbir has largely been interpreted from the prism of masculinity and fantasy,
yet it is hard to ignore larger social narratives that run though his works.
His 2011-12 series ‘Out Here and Now’
is not just an artistic and personal coming out of the closet, it also carries
it an urge to fissure contemporary Indian social narratives about erotica and
manifestation of sexuality. However, his journey is not just about disjuncture
and rethinking/ reimagining his encounter with masculinity, it is also about
weaving this rethinking/ reimagining with the larger universe of his cultural
existence. This larger universe consists
of personal relationships with history, culture, ecology...even melancholia. In
his works one can see a reclaiming of mythology, development and loneliness
woven into a deeply personal fantasy.
This connection between the personal and the universal
brings Balbir’s work into a relationship with the tension between utopia and
dystopia that informs our contemporaneity. His paintings create both the moment
of pause and the moment of provocation, opening possibilities within each
viewer to feel what may be his or her own beatific, but potentially thorny bed
of roses.
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