once upon a time - acrylic and oil on canvas - 84" x 48"

‘Once of Upon a Time’
- Painting with the Maternal Breast Milk

Mrinal Kulkarni reviews the recent set of paintings by the noted artist Rekha Rodwittiya presented in New Delhi by Sakshi Gallery.

Here is a woman artist who heartily and boldly declares that she is a feminist and her ‘personal’ is her ‘political’. In a stream of art history where the history is meant and interpreted as ‘his-story’ Rekha Rodwittiya’s solo exhibition ‘Once Upon a Time’ makes a crucial rupture. Overtly the images presented in the show are the emblematic representation of the artist herself. However, this iconicity of images does not mean that the artist is in an ego trip. This series of paintings reiterates the artist’s belief in what Julia Kristeva’s metaphor of ‘writing (painting) with maternal breast milk’ and the in the concept of ‘essential women’ of Helen Cixous. Rekha experiences life as a series of scenes. As she puts it, “‘this “sequence of paintings” that constitutes the rhythm of this exhibition, forms a metaphorical bracket within which the autobiographical is hinted at obliquely; locating birth, childhood, identity, gender-politics, hybridity, motherhood and other nuanced factors of a witnessed world, to be examined and mulled over.’

Rekha is the lone figure in the contemporary Indian art scene who has successfully combined the role of rebellious daughters with the role of motherhood. The turbulent expressionist angst of Rekha as a young woman has now developed into the simple, direct and iconic representations in this series of works. ‘These paintings explore the cycle of life and are a homage to the ancestry of womanhood, in which the presence of my persona becomes merely its emblematic representation’ writes Rekha

In these paintings Rekha has mothered the images, symbols, space by mirroring certain aspects of the self. This process includes the intercepting of the world, conferring unconditional approval, regulating the environment and supplying of the missing psychic elements. This is exactly the function of ‘mothering’ figures in rearing up a child. Like a mother she is present but not necessarily attentive, functioning as a background for her image’s foreground activity, where fantasies, desires and thoughts are projected.

The iconic language of Tantric miniature paintings has come handy for Rekha’s narrative of women in general. She has derived her images from the plethora of Yakshi and mother goddess images from India as well as from the ancient Egyptian culture. This selection of images and pictorial language also indicates her belief in the matrilineal history. The most interesting aspect of these paintings is the subversive use of the spatial treatment of the Jahangirian portraiture. Here in Rekha’s works the patriarch’s image is replaced by the phallic woman image. These self-willed woman images are seen coolly juggling with various events which are symbolically represented along with the images like sword, pets, skipping rope, toys, kids and so on. The frontality and the calm expression of the images make them enigmatic. It gets loudly pronounced with the bright primary colours.

Rekha’s selection of this pictorial language in order to express the autobiographical with the ‘collective territory’ of womanhood reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s existential stance when she suggests, as a writer, she experiences life as a series of scenes which, after all, happen not just in the mind but in the actual world of action. The essence of the person is a scene, an event. Thus for Rekha autobiography is no longer a generic booby prize for women but it is radical and subversive, not trivial and submissive.
Rekha uses the postmodernist tools to put forward her modernist agenda of feminism. As she herself says in her book ‘…and they lived happily ever after’ that she has a strong ‘spirit of optimism’ close to the avant garde philosophy. She has coloured the avant garde with feminism to visualize the omnipresent matriarchs who has overpowered the male gaze.

Although personally I do not believe in this phallic representation of a Matriarch as an alternative to the phallic representation of the patriarch, when we see the Contemporary Indian art history through a feminist point of view the presence of the modernist feminist artist like Rekha is an important factor. The ‘spirit of optimism’ of Rekha is infectious for the people like me who have been questioned again and again for holding up the relevance of feminism even after the recent backlash.