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Reserved – Of Humans and Objects
C S Venkiteswaran visits the two men show - TM Aziz and Yashwant Deshmukh at the Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi and comes out with a feeling that the very distinction between these two artists’ works bring them face to face in a vibrant encounter.
'Reversed' – exhibition of paintings by two artists – TM Azis and Yashwant Deshmukh, at Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi, collide and contradict, jell and vibe, with each other in peculiar ways. While one is all geometrical and muted, the other is fluid, diffused, and monochromatic yet pulsating with colour. Thus formally and figuratively they stand apart from each other; but this very distinction seems to bring them face to face in a vibrant encounter between the human and the material, a dialogue and interface that is crucial to our period where both have become trivia in their sheer excess and inexorable 'obsolescence'. In this world we inhabit, that of 'throw-away' objects and also relationships, where everything is driven and defined by instantaneous utility alone, these dual reflections exude a kind of intensity and stubbornness that is fast fading away from our lives.
TM Azis's works seethe with human figures – faces of children, crying, frowning, peering, human figures hugging and kissing or watching over anxiously – all animated with deep warmth, intimacy and care. They are akin to illusion paintings, where a crowd of blotches and squiggles gradually coalesce taking the shape and form of the human figure/s as you move away from the canvas. This in a way is a comment upon the ambivalence inherent in figuration and also human relationships, where one sometimes moves away to see the contours of the whole, distancing from the everyday in order to feel the experience of love and longing or of being human. Azis's works capture the fragility and the inherent fragmentariness of human forms even while being acutely tender and caring. One of the major themes that runs through these paintings is that of care, the act of acknowledging the presence of the other. It is this poignant sense of care and love that make them appear as repetitive yet differing variations and renderings of the human figure in various vibrant colours and moods.
In contrast, Deshmukh's paintings are totally devoid of the human figure. They are a series of still images or studies of everyday objects (left behind by the human?). They force a kind of intense reflection upon these objects, making them stand out and gather a life of their own in front of our eyes. These jars, book, envelope, containers, cups, taps etc stand in suspended animation in their solitude. Their contours are stark and solid; sometimes foregrounded and always contrasted starkly by cold, geometrical compositions in dull, muted colours, they assert the primacy of the material in all its stubborn solidity. Obviously they are marked by the human, as manmade, 'handled' objects in use, but in their solitary existence and precision, they stand in contrast to the chaotic disorder and flux of the human that often obsessively seeks to impose order upon the material world. Are these works trying to prise open and probe at this tenuous relationship? These stubborn frontalities, are they trying to turn it onto the human – their makers, users as well as their lovers? |
