Of leap years and yearly leaps…

Abhijeet Tamhane

‘Kya re, bahut din me dikha nahi tu…’  (hi, long time no see) ..) I yelled at a bearded artist in his thirties who lives somewhere at Bhainder, when I spotted him on the ramp… yes, a ramp, adjoining the Jehangir Art Gallery steps.
‘Apan to kabhi kabhi aata hai, tereko to malum hai na…’
(Don’t you know I seldom come here) was the reply.
‘Haa… gaya saal ka pahile last time tera show me mila tha. Aur  kya naya show-bee?’
( We met an year before the last in your show. Are you having one show or something?)
‘Naa re… show to teen-chaar saal me ek baar’
(No man… I show once in 3-4 years)
The conversation stopped, as if it ended there. Minutes after, in my next tea-and-cigarette session at the Museum pavement, alone as usual, I found myself thinking of him: he looked strange, didn’t he? He was not the hip-clothed Bambaiyya artist- as in Jitish Kallat’s “Artist Making a Local Call”. Nor was he clean-shaven, as most of the artists: the types invited to a typical after-party, are. This Bhainder fellow had no pressure of deadlines for an upcoming show. His ‘bio-data’, given as a handout to visitors to his show at the ‘Artist’s Centre’, lived up to his pride in showing only once in four years, if I remember right. As if, he was a person whose birthday is on 29th February.

Is the bearded Bhainde-rwala made an object of pity? No, I plead. The case in point is the rarity of his self-imposed exile vis-à-vis the growing abundance of networked individuals and the reign of connectivity.

Is isolation of an artist a value in itself? Maybe I am a bit conservative on that. I like the distance that Yashwant Deshmukh or Anju Dodiya maintains from fashionable crowds. About these two, it was just a thing I noticed since some years. The microscopic sample I am talking of is totally accessible, yet each one of them seems to know the preciousness of their presence. Last week, their works told me so.

Yashwant moved on from the body of works exhibited at his solo last year. His show at Aditya Ruia’s Bombay Art Gallery, second at its new venue, opened a week after Anju’s dual vernissage at Bodhi Gallery and Bodhi space. Both had surprises in store, especially if you thought of their last shows, just about a year back, were unbeatable. While Anju’s ‘Throne of Frost’ (Baroda, Jan 2007) with works that explored possibilities of embroidery, was a post-colonial take on royal solitude and inaccessibility; her recourse to Sylvia Plath’s poetry in her paper-pulp sojourn at STIP (All Night I Shall Gallop, Singapore/ Mumbai February 2008) demonstrated the logic of  seemingly diverse morphemes. The words printed onto Anju’s paper- sculptures are not hers: some critics would go on a pinpointing spree to tell us how the temperaments of Anju and Plath would not match. Yet, Plath’s poetry sits there with other cryptic clues that Anju is known for. It hits you with the verbal strengths and at once cautions you from any verbal reading of the visuals. Also, the anti-heroic suffering that Anju’s works draw us to, has taken a new turn here: cut-and-paste humour that informs the calendars incorporated in her papers.

Yashwant Deshmukh, whose recent body of works that contemplated the square just did not seem to end, went on to explore the ‘parts and whole’ in the form. The presence of heap (of sand/grain) went to metaphoric heights. In a painting that showed a filled gunny bag in black, Yashwant attained the crescendo of the formal intrigue he yearns for.

Maybe you will find a review of Anju’s or Yashwant’s recent works elsewhere. I spoke to you because I heard both the shows as soliloquies in space. Anju’s exploration of an undefined, loose narrative met a distant cousin in Sylvia Plath, while Anju went on and pushed her viewers to stop being readers of the works. Yashwant’s recent work evoked the physical aspects of matter in what could have been seen as geometrical.