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Works and Curations

Sunday, November 22, 2015

The Hint of Violence:

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