Untouched by commercialism

Uma Nair

The art market has a series of movements-galleries,artists,collectors,dealers and auction houses. Amidst all the hype and hubris of the art boom and the crash and the whispers there are some artists who haven't yet been discovered for what they are worth in the art mart and the two names that come to the fore are those of Seema Ghurraya and Suneel Mamadapur. While Seema works on canvases that are fleecy white with striations and squiggles born out of an evanescent ambient Suneel Mamadapur works on canvases that are rich in intent and metaphorical in tone. Interestingly in Saffronart's emerging contemporary show both these artists are missing. Seema's works are an ephemeral essence of lithe and dulcet tones, her hand and the palette have both over the years grown in proportions of magic and caprice for the soothing intentions and the effect of tranquil quietude that steals over you. I found a few lines of poetry by Jeet Thayil that summed up Seema's works at its best.

Rape in the Virgin Land by Suneel Mamdapur

blank, absent, without meaning
a landscape untouched
by history or memory,
a place whose weather
matches his own.
                                Jeet Thayil

Last year, at the Park Sheraton in Chennai I stood in front of Seema Ghurraya's work and mused over the artist's ability to lace a canvas with a distilled essence of ethereal and ephemeral intonations. Her little squiggles and notations seemed to have a lilt about them, perhaps a lyrical cadence that we hear and understand when we learn classical music. And this set me thinking-the lyrical line in its lithe linearity, coupled with a fine felicity of pristine purity is what Seema Ghurraya's abstractions are. As Clayderman's notes wafted into the lobby the canvas mirrored its muted magic. This was minimalism in another context, a minimalism that mastered the art of repetition and reflected the resonance of a raga. Seema's works at Chemould last year held an exalting tone when it went up on the walls of The Museum Gallery. Mumbaites walked in from the streets to take part of Seema's abstraction, guess at night with the white canvasses glowing in the dark the Zen exposition seemed somewhat like an artistic miracle.

Seema's tonalities are what entice-they could be hints of aqua, aubergine, or even limestone or slate –but it is the amalgam, that unravels the aesthetic of an inspiring and humble  artist who travels for camps and to other places and  comes back with a historic consummation of silent energies that got articulated into varied dictums of sensibility. An exposition of Shelley's `coil of crystalline streams and boughs of heaven and ocean'. Seema will be showing with Gallery Espace in October this year and one looks forward to an uplifting experience.

Work by Seema Ghurraya

The second artist whose works make you stand and stare is Suneel Mamdapur whose show sold out at Palette Art Gallery last year. For Suneel life's drama plays itself out in colours. Try taking the modern day artist's psyche, couple it with the recall of memory, weave into it the photo realist idiom of subverting imagery, and you get the stop-in-your-tracks collection of artist Suneel Mamadapur .

The show, last year at Palette, titled "Song of an abandoned Road," is an echoing of the original movement's capacity to absorb everything from painting and photography to literature and life as Suneel's works speak about a summation of experiences writ large on a series of brilliantly evocative canvases.

"As an artist, I have always been concerned about the world around me," says Suneel. He adds, "My experience of a contemporary world has always been placed me into a dilemma of right and wrong and often my attempts of recreating a 'trustable space' ironically indicates a claustrophobic world, which creates a path to human relations, both socio-political and personal. The experience of my own life becomes my destination to reach at a conclusion through the works in this exhibition."

The two finest works in the show were Rape in A Virgin Land and A Layer of Moss Green. Other paintings feature the suggestion of practices that go back in history, Rape in A Virgin Land has no nude females, but strangely it actually makes you feel truly naked.
Mostly smooth-skinned and awkwardly poised, the parrot that lies in the canoe with two men flanking the canoe's heads, is eclectic — the men are the vision of strength and muscle. They stare with blank, patient expressions.

Even so, one senses the artist's empathy for his subject, surpassed only by an urge to meet the demands of painting. With a quirkily honest eye, he makes palpable the vulnerability of the woman who is not there but she faces us, in the parrot that lies suggesting that she lies helpless, elbows wide and fingertips joined in an indecipherable pose.

The parrot's green colour and its red beak speak of embellishment and feminine attributes. Over-painted contours, visible up close, show how hard the artist worked the composition to get the final position.

The show throbbed with surrealism, slurpy, silent and starkly. Perhaps no other word coined in the realm of art has infiltrated the vernacular so successfully as "surreal." But if the watered-down definition suggests nothing more than a general, dreamlike weirdness, what does that mean for art? Is surrealism merely a historical category? A style? A state of mind?

"Surrealism is about the unconscious, and I feel my work is about the unconscious as well as the conscious," he mused, adding, "except that my unconscious and conscious is filled with metaphoric imagery."

Surrealism in this context functions mostly as a durable term for describing the creative mash up of visual and verbal non sequiturs. Strange juxtapositions, abstract and evocatively sexual imagery and myriad draws on Freud's concept of the uncanny. No two works in the show were similar. The works made you stand silently and partake of cryptic clues woven into the theatrics of life's drama played out in metaphors of moody realism. Another promising artist to collect.