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Home / Memory and the Kitsch
Shubhalakshmi Shukla features the 2007 Bodhi Award winner Sunil Lohar and his constant engagement with the visual history of art in his own works. She says that his paintings are the places where memory and values find a home.
Do the values get comprehended, or are they the manifestations of Home? This was the spontaneous question that Sunil’s paintings triggered off. His paintings are about himself where memory informs values.
Sunil studies details around the everydayness of his locale, or that which is banal. He lives between Gulbarga and Hyderabad (where he finished his MFA from SN School this academic year). Needless to say, the locales in most of the Indian cities do not differ much, yet the recent transformations in these spaces are prominent enough to get noticed. His engagement with these in Hyderabad University Campus, located in the outskirts of city, takes place through references of European art, cultivating a memory of bonding with Modern-Europe, may be for a dialogic-significance. For example, he chooses to paint a portrait of Gauguin, and simultaneously places his own surroundings within the same composition, suggesting the connection between his immediate physical-world as significant as (and similar to) that of Gauguin’s! The Post-Impressionism along with varied aspects of the rise of bourgeoisie-class and industrialization in Europe were concerned with the transformations taking place in the spaces where the countryside met the urban. Does Sunil observe similar transformations lingering in our context as yet?-one may ask.
His imagery is composed of multiple openings on the pictorial plane, simultaneously depicting objects from diverse contexts. Yet, they are connected as a dialogue between the eye, and the memory. These are images from European art-history (books) along with his own self- portrait; as well as art and craft objects collected at home (Gulbarga), both referring to ‘popular’ genre- in a rather unsaid manner. Unsaid because, his stance is not about the insensitivity that gets created through the magnified presences of these objects in our g/local markets (on the web, and interiors of Karnataka). It is rather about, how he reflects upon the existing culture through post-colonial- academic-knowledge-base. When observed in relation to one another, his paintings may be understood as of metonymic significance, where single characteristic (of the quoted art-historical image) amplifies a complex whole in our immediate present.
In Sunil, one sees references from European artists like Gauguin, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Schiele- the artists who have made significant contribution in the art-history of Europe as well as India. While understanding ‘History of art’, one may internalize their lives to the extent of self-bohemianism, till the day! However, these references, for Sunil are a kind of self -reflexive lens for looking into his own surroundings, that is Hyderabad University Campus and the ‘self’ as an artist amongst these landscapes!
In Europe, Avant-garde art initially emerged as a resistance to the State-sponsored art in Salon as well as Academy, which Sunil associates with through the portraits of the quoted artists. Here, it is important to understand that he once again opens up debatable questions regarding our ‘modern’ experiences as rooted in the insights of the Modern-West.
Also within India the ‘Craft’ is considered as valued and not as ‘degraded’ aesthetic (produced through Salon) which get reflected in another set of paintings by him.
‘Father’s Portrait’:
The painting focuses a shelf in his home, at Gulbarga. These are the (craft-) objects collected by Sunil and his father during their frequent visits to Kangi, the town nearby Gulbarga. He has painted these with lot of affection and care, the way they have been gradually collected over a period of time. The last row of the shelf portrays trophies won by his father and Sunil himself. Sunil’s father who is an artist, has won the National award in 1999 for painting, the trophy is shown in golden yellow with inscriptions in red, in the painting.
He painted this shelf without making any changes, as he found the juxtapositions of various objects exceptionally painterly. These, he mentions, are the objects which bring along childhood memories for him, also a collective-experience for appreciation of local crafts within most of the ‘middle class’ houses of this region. He mentions that these were once valued objects, which seem to have gradually lost its significance and meaning.
He brings about an irony in simultaneous juxtaposition of various craft-objects along with the trophies.
‘Self Portrait’:
He paints interior-details of his room juxtaposed with the landscapes outside; from where a fragment of Gauguin portrait looks out at the onlooker, while Sunil himself in anticipation looks at Gauguin. This painting (untitled) has, in fragments, details of the department of Painting at Hyderabad where he studied, the tea shop with the Pepsi logos, classroom, his chair, clothes hung in his room, cycle, a glass of tea, and many other similar details, all immersed in deep silence of the university campus. He paints these in a ‘post-impressionist’ idiom. When seen in relation to ‘David’ one finds in him, a deeper responsibility for these references.
In ‘David’ he shows a row of figurations of David (by Donatello, Verrocchio, Michelangelo and Bernini), while him as an Indian tourist- (art-student) walks in, subtly crushing the meticulous folds on one of the draperies. About such details, he mentioned a critical over-viewing of how within all the quoted images of David, the artists have personified a ‘heroic’ identity of the self.
“I felt artists represented themselves in David but within some limitations; because they were commissioned works and the David was an already available heroic concept. We can see various degrees of stylization, idealization and Realism in the sculptures of David. So, I represented the four Davids in chronological order, in a blue monochrome – suggesting their historical nature. In front of them I represented myself in variations of yellow. My posture and expression shows that I am thinking about them while walking,” says Sunil Lohar.
It is important to understand that Sunil on the one hand, rejects the ‘heroic’ identity of an artist for one self while studying the images of David ( from European Renaissance), and on the other identifies himself with a bohemian self- portraits of artists from much later period (‘Self-portrait’). As we know, the Impressionist radically moved against the Salon-aesthetics and engaged with the banal. Van Gogh subverted the riches and the wealth in the existing examples of Dutch- Still-Lives, with his own pair of shoes. Perhaps, this is critical examination for him too.
Objects as Meanings:
Sunil’s enquiries are extremely germane in the present day visual culture as they suggest a need to know the history of a particular object (Art Vs Craft). His quest for the effects of post-colonial experiences gets invested in his image making process. Thus, even though his references are kitsch, beneath the images lies the signification of ‘meaning’.
For me these observations were passionate enough to understand his engagements with his own realities.
Sunil is the recipient of Bodhi Art award for 2007. He has been the final year MFA student (Painting) at the S.N. School, University of Hyderabad.
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