We are at a time when the word contemporary is being challenged in art and it no longer stands for a digital, conceptual utopia. It is now understood as an operative fiction and to successfully operate within it, an artist has to constantly regulate (manipulate) the division between the past and the present. Otherwise, it is almost impossible to go beyond the placid celebration of the indifference between historical and fictional narrative. Muktinath Mandal plays with this very indifference, re weaving memories into myths as he fights to hold his romanticism against the neoliberal takeover of history and memory.
Muktinath is a one of the few (new) contemporary artists who does not pretend that the Global can easily stand for the Local, he takes recourse to re-presentation, transforming local narratives into an effective critique of contemporary progress, yet not shutting its doors on utopia. Local folklore, religious beliefs and rituals tied to the popular, yet deeply attached to the cultural history of his childhood are integral to the artist’s imagination. ‘Lallu, Nillu aur Mitthu’ (oil on canvas) , is a portrait of three sisters, retrieving memories of a culture when extreme happiness was felt in siblings getting new clothes stitched out of the same yarn, the excitement and shyness of going out together and the innocent conquest of desire. The iconological and painterly detailing comes from a love, empathy and sentimentally which had disappeared from the digital, neo liberal definition of the contemporary...making it cold and alienating.
In terms of formal and stylist evolution, ‘In the Name of River’ (charcoal, acrylic and pastel on canvas) is a water-shed work signalling significant formal interventions in representation of imagery. It is in the photographic and post-photographic culture of the image that the contemporaneity of the contemporary is most clearly expressed. The image interrupts the temporalities of the modern and nature, alike. Muktinath uses the medium of painting to create a subversive iconology that allows him work within the zones between myths and realities, re working personal myths into contemporary memories. Trained in deep-rooted academic realism, Muktinath found deep connections with mediatic realism due to its connections with the popular. Yet he is one of the first artists of his generation to re define mediatic realism from a post digital, post conceptual context. Moving away from the wallpaper like, glossy digital finish that dominated painting, the artist re defines mediatic in more local, non-urban terms. Painting thus stops being just a medium, and becomes a political act, and we see the artist increasing exposing (flaunting) the painterly or linear constructions on the surface, finding confidence to do away with the compulsion of the ‘digital finish’...tarnishing the mundane cosmopolitanism of mediatic realism through a deep affiliation with social realism.
‘100 Letters’ ( ongoing pen, acrylic and ink series on collected postcards), exemplifies the potential of post conceptual painting to work within the polemics of aesthetics and politics. Choosing to mask, hide and expose; Woking with a drawing style that rembers the ‘repotage’, Muktinath challenges the notions of objects, surfaces, archives and art. The postcards are collected from friends, relatives and family in Tulia, a village near bursting metropolis of Kolkata. Tulia, for the artist is not only home, but also a metaphor for resistance to late capitalist greed, its very existence inspiring the improbable combination of nostalgia and hope. Electricity is yet to reach Tulia, yet it is a land of education, culture, knowledge, ethics and (sub?)alterity.
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Rahul Bhattacharya
24.08.2012
