Mikhail’s Stories

Bombay Art Gallery presents a solo show of the Delhi based artist George Martin. In an essay contributed to the catalogue JohnyML tries to contain the spirit of Martin’s recent works.

“Connecting two uncertainties A bridge that you and me cross Happy are we for we don’t see The chasm where certainties hide.”

voice to the auto biographical

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While confronting George Martin’s latest series of six works I am reminded of a character from Paolo Coelho’s novel ‘Zahir’. This young man named Mikhail comes to Europe from the interiors of a war shattered Afghanistan and ekes out a living by retelling his stories at the pubs where guilt ridden human beings come to drink. Mikhail’s stories are full of love and pathos that make people cry and confess. Listening to Mikhail’s stories becomes a cathartic and confessional act for many. Earthly woes are transformed into spiritual blessings, a wound that smarts turns into a transcendental door. Martin’s paintings are the depictions of urban wounds hiding possibilities of imminent transubstantiation.

Transubstantiation simultaneously provokes interpretational possibilities and a blanket ban on interpretations. This Eucharistic magic sticks to a unilateral interpretation, which cannot be taken out of the perimeters of religious symbolism. When it is passed on to the creative liberals, the magical symbolism becomes a desk for the production of sub-texts. On the one hand, the symbolism that Martin adopts from the urbanscapes resists any kind of interpretations. They, like the inscribed commandments on a granite slab, stay deeply etched, bolting all the narrative trapdoors. On the other hand, the eclectic symbolism of Martin’s is inspiring enough to squeeze out a few lines of poetry even from a prose-churner like me.

Early this year Martin’s attempt was to create a particular visual code, which I call(ed) ‘codes urban’, through/as his paintings, which soon gave way to more poetic and autobiographical renderings. The canvases that look like the sites of a colorful explosion, in Martin’s own words, ‘were initially created for blocking the conventional perspective’. Renaissance perspective and its Expressionist variables that enable a narrative were in vogue when Martin joined as an art student in Trivandrum Fine Arts College. Realizing the limitations of such perspective based narratives and at the same time holding on to the ever enduring allure of colors, Martin sought the help of the mechanical devices (computer programs) that in turn helped him to generate his own signature style.

Interestingly, the use of a mechanical device helped Martin to create a reverse perspective as seen through a convex mirror surface, where images bulged out either to loose shape altogether or to embark on a new visual transformation. Like in a kaleidoscopic vision, images on Martin’s canvases appear as abstract forms only to reveal their ‘actuality’ in closer inspection. The physical distance chosen by the viewer to comprehend these works plays a definite role and these paintings in their static state control the viewers’ decisions on the meaning formulation. Decipherability of the generated visual codes and their connecting links to the source codes remain tender and the precarious positioning of the viewer in front of these paintings create an area of flux, constantly challenging their conclusive verdicts.

 The four lines that I jotted down at the outset need to be explained a bit here. What does an artist think beyond his preoccupation with the visual linguistics and structural coherence? However it gets thwarted in the production of subtexts by the viewers, the artist’s basic inspiration comes from, in Jungian terms, the collective unconsciousness, which I would call as the accumulated socio-cultural share and from the immediate images available around. Martin works on and from both these resources. Like many artists of his generation, Martin too is enamoured and disturbed by the phenomenon called ‘urban development’. Flyovers and bridges are made to make the life easy and sophisticated. However, they push something down; certain certainties are curbed and hushed up. And upon which we meet, you and me, thinking all our uncertainties are bridged. Martin recognizes that they are not bridged yet. His paintings are the declarations of that recognition.