My catalogue essay for Indrapramit Roy’s solo-show with Galerie 88 Kolkata. ‘Mezzaterra’, previewing on 20 November, 2015.
“Maybe the "trivial" is just a failed version of the "everyday." The everyday, or the commonplace, is the most basic and the richest artistic category. Although it seems familiar, it is always surprising and new. But at the same time, there is an openness that permits people to recognize what is there in the picture, because they have already seen something like it somewhere. So the everyday is a space in which meanings accumulate, but it's the pictorial realization that carries the meanings into the realm of the pleasurable.”Tumlr, Jan | The Hole Truth.
What is
tension, but a hint of violence?
The
paintings carry the sense of empty sets.
Sometimes they seem to be
anticipating actions, sometimes we see residues of actions by characters that
we never see. Spaces and objects, become metaphors that evoke the drama. The
artist takes away the human agency as the prime actors of the drama, but the
human presence is everywhere - the serendipity and violence that lies in the
zones of absence and presence. The space and the objects speak about that
presence, and are frozen moments of cinematic tension. However, these are not
just spaces and objects; they are of a special kind. These mundane, ordinary
spaces carry the empathy of intimacy, an intimacy achieved, not only through
durational bonding, but also often through experiences and memories. They seem to want to tell a story and stay
silent about what the story could be.
Over a
period of over ten years Indrapramit Roy has been experimenting with a visual
language that capture the emptiness and tensions when mundane
meets the everyday in moments of transience. At the same time;
emptiness, tensions, mundane, transience only touch upon the surface of his
imagination. When one visits his art from the aspect of language formation, one
can read many linkages and cross references in modes and strategies between the
artistic influences, political positions and engagements regarding the
aesthetic value of objects and spaces.
The
Aesthetics of ‘contemporary art’ has long being governed by the idioms of content,
style and concept, when experimentation and investigations over Form and Language
(almost) surrendered to the digital/electronic media. Contemporary Art itself
began by being critically distant, cold; layered by dominant purity, pristine
images, perfect copies and spectacular illusions. Indrapramit Roy belongs to an
early group of contemporary Indian painters who realised that mediatic-realism
needed to be scratched and washed if painting had to offer alternatives to the
neo liberal-digital progress. In the emptiness of contemporaneity the notions
of physicality and body are very important. Indrapramit Roy’s engagement with painting
has always been through a physical engagement with materiality; right from his
very early experiments with frame of the canvas, his journey into multiple and
shaped canvases, the cardbox box period, and lately in his combination of
drawing, marking , painting, overlaying actions that mark his watercolour
series.
Indrapramit
Ray's artistic practice has always found its edge by producing art which is a
constant critique of the ‘fashionable’, interrogating the manner in which
medium, form, motifs are chosen, rendered and presented. Yet his subversion
does not take the direction of the anti-aesthetic. In fact, his dialogue is
deep rooted in the linguistic structure of form, line colour and space (they
become tools for expressing a Jamesonian[i]* lament about the contemporary celebration of
surface-ciality). It attempts to reconstruct the philosophical tradition of
affective alterity and to construct a discourse though one's own artistic
journey.
The
architectonic, layered, compositions, the love for bird’s eye views that become
important for Roy’s language formation hints at of narrative traditions ranging
from the murals of Giotto to Benode
Behari Mukherjee and works of artists like Bhupen Khakhar and Gulam Mohammed Sheikh. At the same time Roy situates
himself in a post narrative mode. The high-density motifs, textures, figures
and postures disappear, instead the viewer is invited to pause and imagine. He
is one of the rare artists who have taken the idea of a culture far beyond the
domains of the narrative and the iconic.
The paintings become propositions towards a fresh understanding of the
pictorial surface. The post narrative
tradition that Roy begins to articulate, is not interested in the city as the
site of the local or in the play of urban folklores. His cities are motifs, visited and revisited
though alienated birds eye views or large illuminated empty spaces; in either scenario
no living beings are seen. The local exists for the intimate viewer, but these
cityscapes are also templates, the artist transforms empirically observed places into wistful critiques of an
empty present and a dystopian future.
The
paintings offer us a space to rest our eyes, and in them, there is enough chaos
to stir our anxieties. We live in an age of the spectacle, when images are
designed to jump at you, craving for that attention that bounces off into the
recesses of your overfed consciousness. In these times Roy offers us a
different mode of seeing. It’s the quaint silence of a tranquil mind, etched
with abstract anxieties.
The manner
in which he mixes his media, the self consciousness about the various mediums
and their aesthetics, and the manner in which he appropriates the photographic,
the mediatic into the ‘painterly’; speak of a deep entrenchment into the
history of visual vocabularies. Deeply influenced by modernity, Roy has always
worked towards a critique of it. One can see his works as an aesthetic critique of modernity , at another level ,
when one reads into his gaze, one sees an awareness of the
historical/aesthetic frameworks of class
consciousness and the understanding of ‘spectacle’ and ‘intimacy’ as
political categories. This class consciousness is significant it a time when
class consciousness become marginal in the globalised imaginations and desires
of urbanity; it marks a certain resistance to the homogenization of the urban into
a globalised cosmopolitan. It is this post modern critique of contemporary,
which strongly marks his experiments with watercolor and drawing.
The lived
cultural memory of the class is layered; layered by the nostalgia of a past,
layered by the anxieties of the day to day, layered by the celebration of the
present and layered by the skepticism and fascinations about the future
Celebration of the neon; co exists with the empathy for the decay.
Sometimes, it gets inverted to celebration of the decay and anxieties about the
neon[ii]. Through the
intimacy of his object studies and alienation of his cityscapes, we see Roy
invoking the relationships between humanity and urbanity, between beauty and
spectacle.
The painted
surface is not just a residue of pictorial mark making and rendering, it is
also a reflection of the artist own gaze, the way he or she engages with the
world, and how images morph inside our heads. Roy is not a flâneur, his gaze is not shifty, behind the scenes and
documentative. Instead his gaze has closer connections with the discourse on
boredom as a discursively articulated phenomenon, one that understands leisure
as both objective and subjective. This brings into his subject matter not just
a sense of response to the world but also a historically constituted strategy
for coping with its discontents. In his paintings, leisure and hints of boredom
become fundamental to the experience of time and problems of meaning, creating
that hint of tension between notions of existence, consumption and taste.
[i][i]
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso,
1991
