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Chronicler of the Dispossessed
Roy Thomas is ready with a major solo show in Delhi. Presented by Aarushi Art Gallery, in this show Roy presents his latest works that mostly deal with the lives of the dispossessed. JohnyML looks at his recent works.
Roy Thomas |
Roy Thomas has evolved in his painterly journey. This evolution could be marked from painting absences in a transcendental space to the painting of presences in a real space. When he prepares for his major solo show in Delhi with the Aarushi Art Gallery in early December one can do nothing but remember his early works and the kind of paths he has taken to reach here. That was a long journey but with a lot of involvement.
When Roy Thomas exhibited his works in mid 1990s his ambition was to find a new surface and medium to express his artistic ideas. He chose tarpaulin as his surface. He had converted huge tarpaulin sheets into the fields of a mental journey, where the angst and ethics of an artist were presented very well. He painted absences of human beings in their silhouetted presence. He attributed them with a halo that made them saints of struggle. Sometimes, human beings with their benign looks looked out at the viewers in even in their tormenting positions. Roy was going through a period of crisis and experiment. However, the crisis of his own works did not deter him from exhibiting them. He exhibited them in Delhi and other parts of the country.
Now, when we confront his works, we feel a sense of settlement in them. Roy has found his language, we tend to feel. He has been traveling all these days to reach here. His ideas are clear and the language sophisticated. They speak to the viewer directly. The emphatic silences in his works remind you of the early absences and the interim cacophony. Of course, there was a period, at least a couple of years back, when cacophony dominated his pictorial surfaces. He was perturbed by the day to day politics of the country, where the innocent human beings are made into victims for no reasons. He painted the means and ends of the tormentors in the form of soldiers, who in turn became the victims of their own deeds. They were the tools in the mighty hands of the state. They did not have any other way than fighting. They fought in their camouflage attires. They killed innocent people and got killed in the process.
The war zone depiction soon got mingled with the images of terror and terrorism. Camouflaging the self with war fatigues or hiding in under the thickets to fight the enemies became a metaphor for him. The single eye that looked out through the façade of leaves became a dominant metaphor for him. The saintly presences transformed into ghostly presences. Imminent terror was implied. He struggled with his subjects as a painter as wells as a human beings. One could say, the sparse presentations of his works in group shows were skeptical in several ways.
The fad of mediatic realism had not attracted Roy Thomas in the beginning, though he used a lot of mediatized images in his works. Mediatic realism, however, became attractive for him, with a lot of personal inputs, only when his philosophy changed substantially. Now Roy has a very intimate attitude and philosophy on and towards art. He looks at the world from a sublime state of mind. Human beings for him have become one of the occupants, that too, temporary occupants of the world. He believes that the world is a place for all what has been originated and created. This all comprising philosophy has led him to paint several images of those species that are at the verge of extinction. Turtles, African cocks and many other creatures appear in his works repeatedly only to tell the human being that they were the victims of the human deeds. There is no accusation but only revelations and these revelations function as the driving force behind these paintings.
For the artist, losers are the ultimate winners. They win because they lose with grace. Though histories are written on the deeds of the victors the languishing presence of the vanquished makes these histories silly and questionable. In the paintings of Roy Thomas, the vanquished are given importance. The dispossessed people have become the heroes of his paintings.
Closing down of the dance bars in Mumbai by the extreme right wing activists could be one of the ethical issues for the conscience keepers of the society. But the issue takes a different surreal positioning in the works of Roy. He presents the interior of a dance bar with the dancing girls in action. And amidst of this scene he paints a tiger walking. This tiger could be a chauvinistic presence of morality or could be a direct reference to the right wing politicians. But what makes this work fly above these quotidian connotations is the artist’s ability to look at the issue from the bar girls’ point of view. He paints them as still celebrating their lives even in the midst of the beastly presences.
Roy is a chronicler of the dispossessed in his works. He paints those children who were rescued by the police from the child labor sectors. These children look tired and gloomy. They look like drunken by their own insecurity. The looming presences of several wine glasses add a surreal quality to this works. They are not wine glasses but glasses of juice provided to them by the police. The mediatized image can misinterpret the issue, asserts the artist. Similarly, Roy paints new born babies from extreme terrains and hostile conditions. He calls them ‘survivors’. He celebrates their lives with a sense of love and compassion. Roy’s paintings thus become the saga of the dispossessed.
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