FEATURE

Jitish in studio

Sweating Utopias

Jitish Kallat and Gitanjali Dang walk along the memory lanes as the artist comes back to Mumbai art scene with a two-gallery solo show titled ‘Sweatopia’. Gitanjali sees how this 33 year old artist has grown from ‘PTO’ to “Sweatopia’.

In 1995, at a group showing at the Jehangir Art Gallery, gallerist Shireen Gandhy first took note of Jitish Kallat. The then 21-year-old artist was exhibiting a work titled Flower Child Operates the Funeral of a Schedule. In this painting, the fresh out of college Kallat was articulating his need to escape the rigidity of time and space, as experienced during his academic years at the J J School of Art.

Eruda

From this point on things snowballed. And in the December of 1997 Kallat had his first solo in Mumbai. Entitled PTO,the two-gallery exhibition was housed at galleries Chemould and Prithvi with local rock group Pentagram ratcheting up the anticipation levels with their performance at the Prithvi end.
Fast-forward ten years. December 2007, Kallat is marking his decade-long passage with Sweatopia, another two-gallery solo, currently on display at Chemould Prescott Road and Bodhi Art. This exhibition of recent and new worksmarks Kallat’s return to the city after a three-year gap. Humiliation Tax, his last solo, happened in 2005. 

The 33-year-old artist says, “This is a very nice moment. I had my first exhibition when I was 23-years-old. Things are different now… but back then it wasn’t very common to show works that early. I’m glad for the start I received.”

The new exhibition with its edgy title is an umbrella idea under which Kallat trots out his longstanding preoccupation with the urban. But this has not always been the case. As an art student Kallat did abstract paintings in the high modernist idiom. “Early on I did some abstract paintings. Approximately 40 are still around. Reena (Saini Kallat) has preserved them.”

Although abstraction may appear a non sequitur in the urban-themed projects Kallat has undertaken in the recent past, the hide and seek of colour and texture as found in abstraction is a continued presence in his painterly practice. This process of layering and crypting has directly made its way into Kallat’s paintings. Often the urban milieu may appear blasé and banal but Kallat’s eye scans the surface in order to flake off layers. The distressed look or peeled off poster appearance of his paintings could be traced back to the artist’s early interest in abstraction.

About Friendly Fire (Cloud in the Waters), a new suite of 16 paintings, Kallat points out, “In 2006, when the hysteria over the sweet seawater in the Mahim Creek erupted I was glued to the television. In Sweatopia,I try to study a city pushed to its extremes. With a city going helter-skelter looking for a miracle, Friendly Fire… resonates the idea entirely. 

In the photo pieces Cenotaph (A Deed Of Transfer), Kallat assesses the demolition drives he witnessed in the city earlier this year. The torn down structures in these lenticular prints have the beat-up appearance of the artist’s paintings.

Kallat’s work has always been characterised by its playfulness and his penchant for jaunty titles. Sample: Early on the artist displayed a cheeky irreverence when he titled a double portrait of his parents Mom and Pop Art.
He elaborates, “In Sweatopia the works have an underbelly of seriousness that in turn triggers off playfulness.” Autosaurus Tripous, a part of the current exhibition, highlights the same. This sculpture of a rickshaw is a tease for sure. In it Kallat depicts the behemoth that moves unsteadily in suburban by lanes, as a skeletal remain… grinning teeth and all.

With his Rickshawpolis series in 2005, Kallat inaugurated his engagement with automotives and vehicular traffic. Since then he has been employing them as a motif for city dwellers and urban dissonance. For his suite of photographs titled 365 Lives, he photographed the hammered in chassis of vehicles. “With this work I wanted to register the city through images of collision. Initially the repetition may be retinally pleasing but I hope repeated viewings will result in the dents being read as wounds.”

In addition to the iconography, Kallat’s constant engagement with the burgeoning megapolis scene is also reflected in the scale adopted by the artist. As though covertly competing with the deluge of mass media, the scale of his works can often be comparable to that of the hoardings. He responds, “Some of my earlier paintings were the size of billboards. Scale is important for me. I think the interactivity of the work is lost if you down scale it.”