Within the Cycles of Time: Jaganath Panda’s 'Deep Time – Metamorphic Spheres'

‘Deep Time –Metamorphic  Spheres’ - installation view 

In ‘Deep Time –Metamorphic  Spheres’,  we encounter a work that transgresses the divides between ‘painting’ and mural , pulling us towards reading  a narrative- then trapping us into an encounter with the timeless;  a zone where time meets eternity. The narrative in Indian post modern tradition pictorial tradition has predominantly engaged with reclaiming of lore and mythology. Jaganath Panda occupies the zenith amongst contemporary master storytellers, carrying a long tradition with him that flows through Binod Behari Mukherjee, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Bhupen Khakhar, Atul Dodiya . However, growing up in Odhisa must have exposed him to the temple panels and the magic of pictorial narrativity in large scale. As Panda becomes more and more confident in his practice one can see him using scale as tool to envelope and seduce his audience as he creates settings for his contemporary myth making.  ‘Deep Time – Metamorphic  Spheres’  (re)members  Binod Behari in making the body a part of the viewing experience, and then inviting the eye to feast on the intricate designing and detailing.  This work marks a certain resistance to be ‘just a painting’. It seeks to be graffiti, a mural, an installation, and an epic, almost everything but just a painting. This desire to simultaneously be everything is a defining characteristic of contemporary experience.

Panda employs a certain Mattissian engagement with Beauty, using it as reason to make art and also using it as a device.   Beauty for him is an important trope, the 'finished', the 'sensual' and the 'rich' draw in the viewer and create that moment of pause.  The shades of cobalt, ultramarine and gold allure to the rich European renaissance frescos and the miniatures form Persia.  The exaggeration in the Persian style treatment of water is juxtaposed mediatic realism, hints of water color treatment, and a surrealist understanding of land /city scapes. This pastiche of styles enables Panda to stake a claim on ‘Beauty’ as a form of contemporary expressions. One is tempted to read into his intricate designing of the pictorial surface, his attention to lines and their rhythms is inspired by his early associations with the painting traditions in the villages of Odhisa.  (Compared the folk painting tradition of neighboring Bengal, in Odhisa one sees a very skilled use of line, a play with curvilinear rhythm, and dense surface detailing.) Even if that is true, what is more important is how the artist masks this inspiration, creating a bridge between traditional and globalised understanding of line and rhythm.

Deeply rooted in bramhanical history and mythology since childhood, Jagannath Panda has been exploring (t)his creation of parallel fantasies - exploring  these  mythologies  and exploring the metaphoric possibilities of  animals as witness- protagonists. However here we see a small but important shift here. Many of his works feature an animal bearing witness to contemporary urbanity and slow demise of 'nature'; resulting in a poignant confrontation with its own mute victimhood. 

Here we see the fish coming as an active witness to the cycles of change.  She is mute, but no longer a victim, a small change that transforms her muteness into silence. It (further) becomes clear that the silence is an active voice, the fish is full of dynamism and movement, bringing in the force and whims of the natural world, almost having the power to make us humans mute to the grand cycles of change. Gone are the tensions between the binaries between nature and culture.  There is a promise of a new existence – a metaphoric allure to the existing territories being swept away.  The fish comes from Vishnu Puran (A 5th-6^th Century AD text, considered to be the most important amongst Vaishnavite Puranas), and alludes to the myth of Manu and the flooding of the earth.  At the moment of the grand deluge, the fish comes in as the audience-witness to the changing cycle of times. Is there a (possible) bemusement it feels while witnessing the (hu)man’s oblivion.

There are some definitions of contemporary and contemporanity that define this as a historic moment where history (imaginations of the past and future) is culturally useless. Lifetime now means five-ten years in various popular cultural contexts; and indeed ‘now’ and the immediate have become more important than any sense of the past or the future. As Zubin Mehta grandly orchestrates on the ruins of Nalanda, and the mythical Shivaji replaces the mythical Manu with his contemporary Hindu nationalistic masculinity, they transform into  protagonists of a magnificent celebration of ‘nowness’. This engagement with the moment does not only come from post capitalist desire generating structures, it has also been recurrent anchor for contemporary spiritual thought (s).  Nonetheless, Panda ambushes this ‘nowness’, constantly keeping it surrounded by references to the ‘infinite’.  The use of mandalas (as a constant recurring theme in), and deployment of Fibonacci numbers as the device of connecting the two walls effectively hints at a philosophical critique of this ‘nowness’. 

One can (still) see the some glimpses when the night time is brooding, and the city/land scapes carry an air of post humanity.  Yet they are just moments in the cycle of time, offset by various other moments in the constellation.  The clockwork and anti clockwork forces of the lines strike a zone between activation of tension and harmony. This perfect poise is ruptured through the use of graffiti, where the wall too becomes a site for pictorial depth, (possibly) reminding us of the layers of memory and forgetting that reside with the dimensionality of a moment.