The Power of Paper

Uma Nair reviews the recently concluded ‘Paper Flute’ show at Gallery Espace in New Delhi and argues that this exhibition showcased such works that challenged the notion that paper is a weak medium.

There are some materials which have the ability to fascinate and captivate the people who work with them. Paper is one of them. It awakens the creative mind, is used for writing on and in the artistic tenor offers infinite possibilities. In the capital city of Delhi where crass commercialism has overtaken galleries and ventures Johny ML's curation of The Paper Flute' came as a pleasant surprise, not for the sake of paper but for the versatile handling and the credibility of a sound curation in terms of artistic advantage and numerous aesthetics.

Perhaps one should begin with the architectural dictates of the young and lovely Pooja Iranna ,who creates quietly and revealed a frame of chromatic colour that at once became a gorgeous pasture for the art lover to graze in. One thing about the power of paper is the mere fact that a number of drawing shows held in the capital city have reflected the fact that curating a paper show just for the heck of it can turn out to  become a sullen wasteland where the subjects are increasingly small, and the compositional layouts depressingly unimaginative. Pushkin and Manjunath Kamat give us the opposite of that surmise-they instead use paper as a certain privilege, Kamat gives us 10 short stories in his graphic best as he spins tales and weaves tapestries of image play that dazzles the viewer with their inventiveness and minimalist tonality of contour and color.

His pen and pencil outlines were carefully but not overwhelmingly etched, and filled out with flat colour washes-this is the poignant tenor of young Pushkin from Kerala. Combined with his ability to frame a subject and to pare down the detail to the bare essentials, his paintings have a remarkable force. Another painter much influenced by that paring down is Iranna, who employed a toning-down of colour perhaps more monochromatic, which seems at first sight to be a reversion to the monochromatic washes of the earlier styles, but in his case is a carefully controlled exploitation of muted tonal values -- compare his work , where the human and the textured strains of earthy terrain frame an empty centre, with the distant building only hinted at, in which the same framing technique is employed, but here leading to a fully worked-in and out focus with man and a balloon like object.

With Manisha Gera Baswani it is a case of using cut outs to  juxtapose versatile instincts in time-the lotus that emerges unravels an extraordinary imagination and brings her visionary work to the attention of a wider public. An artist who is solidly grounded in all techniques, although he found that ink etching would be better adapted to expressing his ideas than just watercolour is Murali who whips up the magic of  mediaeval sculptural intents with  his sinuous drawing and suavely flashy colouring to produce  ethereal pictures.

I think I preferred Babu Xaviers works done on paper 10 years ago, but there is no doubt that he has technical facility and fertility of imagination both of which were greater in his earlier period. He produced ravishing work before. A quick look at the show also unravels Bhowmick a lover of nature who uses nature as a visionary subject and you wonder if he wished to depict 'earth spiritualised'.  The show excels for its ability to paraphrase the 'mystic and dreamy glimmer' which we found in William Blake's works years ago. Sumedh Rajendran’s ‘Maximum Slum’ is a work, which tells the viewer that paper could be so expressive in sculptural format too. Sumedh looks at the dehumanized urban development projects from a human point of view. The morphing of a pig’s hind side with a drain pipe turns out to be a poignant imagery.

At first the show looked hugely ambitious in scope and stunning in execution. In contemplating the work of these artists, we should pause to consider the difficulties which artists of this period encountered in handling their materials so many years ago. They mixed their own colours (their recipes usually kept very closely guarded secrets), and relied on repetition of successful experiments for the consistency of their output, until colour makers  started to produce more reliable paints commercially. Paper too was a problem -- most were inadequate to handle the delicate effects inherent in the watercolour techniques, papers often being under-or over-absorbent and uneven through single sheets yielding patchy results. In time great improvements were introduced by paper-makers like Watman, whose efforts put at the disposal of the artistic community in England better basic materials than were available to fellow-painters abroad. This show became a cornerstone in both reflections and ruminations. In an age where collectors and galleries are obsessed with canvas the show Paper Flute once again reaffirmed that in paper there is both magic and caprice!