The Dancer on the Horse
Reflections on the Art of Iranna G R
G.R.Iranna |
G.R.Iranna’s life and art are featured by Ranjit Hoskote in an exclusive monograph titled ‘The Dancer on the Horse’. Published by London’s Lund Hamprees, this monograph will be distributed by Mapin in India. Release of this book coincides with a major solo by the artist at Berkley Square Gallery, London. We publish excerpts from this book:
From the small pastels and drawings that he essayed at the beginning of the 1990s to the magisterial large-format diptychs that have engaged his attention in recent years, Iranna G R has consistently displayed a measure of audacity in the range of his subjects and the manner in which he addresses them. Iranna has never fought shy of unlocking the ancestral cabinets of the guild: he has repeatedly confronted the grand narratives of myth and improvised elliptical allegories from the raw material of history: in his work, he alludes to the sketchbooks of Renaissance masters and to the iconography of the late mediaeval Vijayanagara Empire; to the manual of Yoga and to footage from the wars of the early 21st century. In a painting pointedly titled ‘Creation: Not After Michelangelo’ (oil on canvas 1995), which he produced soon after graduation from the Delhi College of Art, the artist summarily recast the scenario of Adam’s advent, as enshrined on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and in the global popular imagination.
Indeed, Iranna’s own journey could have been patterned on one of the templates of radical transformation that globalization-era India specializes in. Born Iranna G Rukumpur (he has used several variation of his name in print before settling on Iranna GR) in 1970 in the village of Sindgi, on the northern border of the peninsular Indian state of Karnataka, the future artist grew up on his father’s farm, working in the fields and studying at the Sarang Math, a school whose practice bridged traditional learning and the demands of modernity. He discovered his gift for image making very early. His father encouraged him in the appreciation of religious icons, whether votive images of the inventively rendered figures of divinities, midway between iconography and science-fiction, that recur in Indian calendar art. As a boy, Iranna delighted in drawing large chalk figures on the asphalt surface of a new road, especially the epic figure of Hanuman, the demigod, who manifests himself in the form of a monkey. Iranna found his true calling when his guru gave him the freedom to follow his own imagination while decorating a temple.
Iranna’s chosen vehicle of articulation is the allegorical tableau; an idiom that offers its contents to the viewer with disarming candor, even as it withholds many of the subtexts that would render them readable- so investing its protagonists and situations with the quality of enigmatic presence. Iranna takes advantage of the critical and even adversarial stance that allegory permits, while also nourishing its potential for all that cannot be decoded, cannot be named; the expressive and the sensuous. It is a tribute to his ingenuity and tireless self-questioning that he has perfected his allegorical art, for its roots lie in artistic choices that were widespread to the point of being formulaic during his student years. At that date, the styles of the Italian Transavantgarde had won considerable favor with the votaries of the narrative and allegorical option in Indian figuration; they had percolated to his generation through the works of their immediate predecessors, many of them associated with the influential Faculty of Fine Arts at the Maharaja Sayaji Rao University, Baroda.
An unmistakably autobiographical note sounds through Iranna’s works of the late 1990s, especially in the series titled ‘Shadows of the Real’, where he introduced such protagonists as the questor traversing landscapes punctuated by furrows, ploughshares, lamp columns, tree-stumps, chain-hooks and phallic horns, springing from trapdoors.
Iranna’s accomplishment, in his work during the first few years of the 21st century, was to extend his investment in the figure considerably, in terms both of pictorial inventiveness and metaphorical charge. His aims were twofold; first to consolidate the archetypal figure as bearer of existential crisis and second, to restate the relationship between this figure and a versatile ground characterized by sensuous plenitude as well as menace.
Fluent and oneiric, the relationship between figure and ground in these paintings is reminiscent of the organically flowing forms of semi-divine, human, animal, chimeric and vegetal life in the sculptural programmes of the Sanchi and Bharhut stupas. It is one of the subsidiary achievements of an artist such as Iranna that he should have brought, into the domain of the contemporary, this abiding sense of the play of the life energy-lila, which is consciousness and circumstance woven into one fabric- without lapsing into a deplorably auto-Orientalist illustration of traditional motifs.
Iranna has also renewed his commitment to an obdurate pictoriality; we must note his insistence on making images that place stringent demand on the viewer, being resonant with a mythic significance that lies beyond the parameters of everyday experience. Previously, as we have seen, Iranna has made various approaches to the heroic male figure; the body yogic and the body electric, the sublime and the effulgent body, the body levitating in a trance. Now, the figure is more flexible, even more amenable to riddle-like paradox than before, even more resonant with the mandate of emancipation from circumstances.
To this writer, the most plausible self-portrait of Iranna G R is, perhaps, that of the artist as the dancer on the horse. While pursuing the logic of his own movements, the dancer must also keep track of the horse’s changes of mood and direction; as the artist must follow his own practice but also maintain a keen awareness of how the world is changing around him. The artist’s perennial task is that of finding the appropriate relationship between inner and outer realities; between the fruits of solitude and the gifts of sociality; between the sanctuary-like atmosphere of the studio and the demands and opportunities of the public sphere. There is an admirable dynamism to the dancer on the horse, and also an ability to live with risk, to perform the self as a defiant figure of hazard.
(Published with the consent of the artist, Iranna G.R) |
