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The Treeless Lands

Growing concerns over the depletion of environment reflects the tentative opening up to feminine values and that are present in the works of Gayatri Gamuz, says Amrita Gupta Singh after visiting the artist’s solo show at the Hacienda Gallery, Mumbai.

The crisis of modern man is an essentially masculine crisis, and if one looks at the intellectual histories of our civilization, the emphasis has been on the differentiations of nature (woman) versus culture (man), emotion versus rationality, and the denial of all that the masculine has projected as the ‘other’.The world establishment is firmly entrenched in the business of war and in the investment and export of weapons, and the forces of globalization only serve to annihilate native traditions. With reports of ecological catastrophes, of dirty clouds, acid rain, global warming, green house gases, ozone depletion, temperature discords, melting of glaciers, degradation of forests, wildlife habitats and air quality, nations engage in rituals of discussing ecological nationalisms, but it becomes again a power tussle of the impositions of neo-imperialists over the developing countries. Outside the corridors of power is an increasing reaction against political and corporate policies supporting the domination and exploitation of the environment. One could read this as the emergence of the feminine in our culture: visible in the growing empowerment of women, the tentative opening up to feminine values by both men and women, the alternatives of organic produce, eco-feminism and the restoration of our natural selves.

Protecting something as wide as the planet is still an abstraction for many, but Gayatri Gamuz calls for these narratives in her paintings. A Spanish artist residing in South India, her paintings are evocative of the ecological concerns of our times, the return to nature and nurture. Her works explore the nature/culture/technology debate. Without being overtly political, her paintings claim clear azure blue skies without dirty clouds, while positioning humans and animals in increasingly de-forested lands, poetically beckoning for a deep change of consciousness of humanity towards a process of regeneration and understanding of pagan philosophies, of ‘stopping and observing’ rather than ‘passing and looking’, of the dismantling of the ego and the blending of the human microcosm in the cosmic macrocosm, of a world without hierarchies.
In her solo show ‘In a Land without Trees’ presented by Hacienda Gallery, Mumbai, Gamuz in her signature style, places animals, humans and objects against surreal landscapes, bringing in the symbolisms of toys and plastic elements as the metaphors of capitalist cultures, which demarcates us from our natural worlds while providing perfect substitutes for contentment  in our modern lives. Gayatri brings in her localized environment in her works, and the cultural duality of being a white Spanish in a post-colonial country; of a split identity does not appear in her work, evoking a humanist philosophy, despite impositions of geographical boundaries and diverse nationalities. As she says, “Wherever you are more important than where you are from”, reminding one of Che Guevara’s ideal of a border-less society.
Gamuz celebrates the return of realistic, hyper- realist and figurative in the contemporary art practice and aligns to the tenderness of the human spirit which she finds expressed, in the photography of Rineke Dijkstra, the paintings of Gottfried Helnwein and the sculptures of Ron Mueck. Reflecting on the psyche of loss, Gamuz portrays birds on trees of wires, a plastic gun found in popular culture aimed at the head of a deer, a large migratory bird finds itself left with only a bucket of water, while an egg appears within a green maze, with inverted birds straining against the frames of the canvas. It is the image of a world upside down, dislocated from its moorings, a crisis that waits to be restored. Gamuz speaks intimately of the concerns of the 21st century, of the fragmentation of the human condition, her resistance appears passive, but through profound visual poetics, Gamuz imagines of an alternative world order, where our histories need to be re-written with tenderness and love.