Wet and Dry

Abhijeet Tamhane

The suburban rail tracks were wet, some had doubled up as canals and the trains were jammed for almost a day… that's monsoon in Mumbai. In art parlance, 'monsoon in Mumbai' once meant a dry season at the galleries. Unlike a decade ago when 'gallery collection' or 'student show' marked the rainy days, Mumbai galleries are running new shows this June. Pundole has  Prabhakar Kolte, while Chemould will have a show by Archana Hande in the first week of July.

Kolte's work has changed. His 2006-07 suite of paintings, in oil as well as his favourite opaque watercolour, are evidences of his caressing attitude toward his art. Sweeping remark this, you may
think; but as you gaze, grasp and grapple each work you hear the tone of these abstracts. There is some playful activity with the drips in Kolte's works, but this time the play is multidirectional. You see the Kolte layer that covers all else done before and yet the cryptic fields left open by the solid layer are more visible than ever. These left-open, uncovered marks of colour have searched newer, cozier spaces for themselves and the forms these spaces incarnate have something to do with a private calligraphy. If abstract paintings are like dreams, Kolte's newer dreams are self-conscious without having to be self-assertive. The lack of self-assertiveness is not a negative quality here. It rather paves the way for more meaningfully positive instincts of play and work.

Archana Hande's show opens at Chemould Prescott Road in the first week of July. She was still working when I visited the gallery. It was a delight to experience another transformation of this huge new gallery space, after Atul Dodiya and Anant Joshi. 'You have to feel the space to know what you are doing', said Archana. Her ways to approach her text and context have also been reliant on the feelings that her work emits. The visuals, at first glance, easily flirt with your imagination until they make you uncomfortable with the deliberately borrowed aesthetics. The central questions of purity and impurity, authenticity and ostensibility underlay her work. A façade of Victoria Terminus (now Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus), a typical 'new economy' building and a woman's hut are the structures of her reference, and what lies inside calls for individual response.

The islands of wet and dry are here in Kolte’ and Archana's works. They will enhance an experience of a reassuring monsoon in Mumbai.