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Keep Drawing

Curated by Chintan Upadhyay, ‘Keep Drawing’ presented a group of artists’ revisit to the medium of paper. Shubhalakshmi Shukla finds out the reasons why this exhibition hosted by Pundole Gallery, Mumbai was exciting.

The most noteworthy and critical feature of this curation is that it asserts the presence of artists who prefer to work with hands in the age of domineering presence of New Media art.

Yet the curation seems to well focus the formal aspect of the execution of the art works. All the artists have presented two visuals as separate frames. In each case the two are connected. A few of them like Lochan and Chinmoy Pramanik construct a single visual as split into two equal halves in two separate frames, or repeated imagery in case of Virendra Shah.

I would like to begin with Chinmoy Pramanik’s black hill, slit into equal halves aiming to blast in the open sky the coffins on the right frame as well as houses on the left frame.

Perhaps this visual can lead the viewer to Indrapramit Roy’s painting of the angstful and engulfing city of Baroda. An endless journey of entrances from one door to another that opens into consistent violence. This could not certainly be an existential experience for those who have witnessed the darkness of these nights after nights..! Its fumes have probably become everlasting in those eyes and even their interiors /bedrooms seem to have an impression of it in some or the other form.

Where Virendra Shah’s transparent cylindrical columns seems to transmigrate this smoke and black soot as energy surfaces between the sky and the earth or more poetically between heaven and hell, the submission seems to appear powerfully in the works of Shreyas Karle.

Insignificant particles suggesting human presence appear to move randomly within cylindrical spaces between heaven and earth in Virendra Shah’s works whereas Shreyas’ Karle prefers to execute a religious presentation about the cleansing process of the body excreting feaces. The description is however more clearly about human mind that could concentrate upon a collective activity around oneself rather than bout the excretion of the feaces in literal sense.

Shreyas seem to get spotted more acutely because of the specific choice of Hindi which he philosophically modifies. ‘Shouch Kriya’ an act of excretion as ‘Soch Kriya’ an act of thinking! The work entitled “Em : Soch Kriya Batana” reads in this way the five regular points that seems to enter the human head inverted on the chair where the brain seems to be in the process of emptying itself. Like a disgruntled body the semiotics of human anatomy gets fused; where facial features and organs of excretion replace each other in numbers-  reading ‘Kone-clusion: soch kriya dikhayi’.
(eye as -1, intestine/ brain as -5, an out growth of or pharynx  in the throat region as 3 etc).

The work is potent enough to bring back the memory of images by one of the most significant artists in Indian art scene today, Bhupen Khakkar.

A dialectic gets created for the above visual through the works of Riyaz Komu’s ‘EGO Brain’ wherein a line drawing suggestive of war zones in the world-map is cornered in the plane sky. This is placed adjacent to the nose-less human head gradually transforming into a skull with its open mouth crackling a disastrous cry.

This kind of visualization takes the shape of an indifferent or a passively seated individual (object) before the TV- an inverted eye, as abstracted by Chintan Upadhyay. His second drawing is placed on the adjacent wall – which is a black tea pot spouting in a basin. Mechanized and melancholic human figures appear once again in the drawings of Arun H.G., whereas Bose Krishnamachari draws tall twin towers surrounded by scratches of red ball pen creating the earth and the sky as surroundings.

Taking the line from Chinmoy Pramanik’s black hill, I would like to bring back the noted point on slit imagery of a Black Hill divided into equal halves by Chinmoy Pramanik. It houses under the open sky a heap full of identifiable objects like bullets, ruffled up houses, dray leaves and a huge lock which refuses to open up in any case..!