A cohesive confluence at Shridharani
Two esteemed galleries in Delhi came together to create Confluence at Triveni Kala Sangam’s Shridharani and you could feast your eyes on a bevy of masters.
Sanchit Art and Dhoomimal Gallery present a collective exhibition featuring Indian art luminaries including F. N. Souza, M.F. Husain, Anjolie Ela Menon, Jamini Roy, Manjit Bawa, G.R. Santosh, Sakti Burman, Satish Gujral, Jogen Chowdhury, Rameshwar Broota, Thota Vaikuntam, and Neeraj Goswami which ends tomorrow.
Anjole Ela Menon’s portrait of a Brahmin boy is at once a beauty of multiple dimensions. In the 1960s while Menon was a student in Paris she was exposed to the technique of layering paint onto hard surfaces, giving her work a distinct burnished quality.
The present work shows an adolescent Brahmin boy, identifiable through the ritualistic mark on his forehead. Anjolie has frequently depicted priests and sadhus in her works from the 1990s onwards. Her penchant for portraits is well known. She is particularly known for dynamic and evocative paintings that reflect the strong influence that traditional culture paradigms held, along with this she adds geometric forms and lithe lines, like the little triangular pieces of cloth behind his head. She achieves a highly personal linear rhythm, contrasting graceful portraits, delineation of forms on the same picture plane and a feeling of highly intense sensuality.
Krishen Khanna the last of the Progressives is represented here in an oil on canvas from 2014 which is a fine rendering of a human face and torso. Collectors have waxed eloquent on Krishen’s willingness to experiment, his growing, his love for the use of colour, and his utter joy in creating so many series of works that were about his life as well as characters from literature as well as holy books he had read. This image has multiple references in ways of seeing.
His portraits were created on the basis of his own imagination. Individuals for him were reflections on the notions of beauty and illusion of famous poets. He creates a portrait within an -abstract winter landscape, set in shades of autumnal accents. What is always succinct is his translation of imagery and his uniqueness in handling the subjects he chooses to paint; he also gives visual expression to hauntingly lone themes of characters from human memory as well as experience of literature to create unseen heroes and everyday people who are fascinating to gaze at.
One of Krishen Khanna’s closest friends, India’s greatest abstract landscape artist Ram Kumar’s 2013 work on paper is a testimony to time. The little tree and vistas and vignettes are all a study of minimal aesthetic. Perhaps none could describe it better than Richard Bartholomew who wrote in 1982:” It would appear that the planes of time get interlocked with the multiple perspectives of the landscape in Ram Kumar’s paintings. There is a sweep of variegated masses, structures in the painting referring abstractly to landscape elements, which suggest movement in time and space. The atmosphere which characterised many landscapes is transmuted into a complex but tangible mood. Wordsworth’s definition of poetry, “the overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility,” applies aptly to Ram Kumar’s formulation of the remembered landscape”.
Self-taught Manoj Dutta who was discovered and encouraged by Jogen Chowdhury’s drawing of the lotus leaves and ducks with pen and ink and wash are a study in perfection of lithe lines. This study stands still as if the movement of air can be a gentle breeze. It can be a moment, caught in the aftermath of rain. The background in the simplicity of ink and wash on board has a tenor of infinity and eternity too. The air, the movement of which can only be felt, stirs the top of lotus leaves. And one can stand admiring the ducks in reverie. In such a study you are part of nature and nature is within your recesses.
‘There is a spatial quality in the paintings of Neeraj Goswami, the modern master. His large work The Moon Dot is a masterpiece in meditation and prismatic offerings. Moon Dot (Chandra Bindu). You stand as you enter Triveni’s Shridharani and walk towards this gorgeous layered work of coloured light filled with a softened spectrum of hues, from vivid primaries to surreal pastels. Treatment for Goswami is defined by his balance of illusion and reality, colour shapes are crisscrossed by lithe shadows cast by the punctuated areas of lighter tones. He revels in modern abstraction at its iridescent best. Physical realities and picturesque panoramas play out in this canvas. Neeraj plays and magnifies the impact of the fluidity of space and weaves in meditative meanderings. Between scattered geometries and endless possibilities, we glimpse and savour infinite iterations of the tangible and intangible.
Jogen Chowdhury’s drawings of birds are a delight to behold. My favourite is Bird 1. There is both a sense of flight, a hint of movement, in the wings and an aerial perspective (perhaps a series of perspectives). Chowdhury looks at his subjects, sets them in a landscape in a number of ways as well as presents different angles and points of view. Everything from the past as well as present is here. There is also movement and a kind of frontal view of the bird as subject. At once dynamic and expressive, it reminds us of wedges of land and expanses of water; both arid and fertile; febrile rock and vegetation; sunlight and shade; moisture; mist.
