INVITED INTO ABSTRACTION:

Art is made as one lives….one person is a unity and somehow after the long complex process, a work of art is a similar unity.
                                              Donald Judd, 1983

Colour over the years has had a plentitude of interpretive possibilities. It was at Donald Judd’s exhibition in 1988 at Whitney Museum of American Art that one was introduced to the intensity and multiplicity of colours.

Perhaps the two works of Kishore Shinde each cohesively painted as convoluted flat colours and abutted edge-to-edge, both lumpy and organic reflect this ability of reflecting how colours and surfaces can span a spectrum. Perhaps the answer is structural. Kishore’s supple strokes create an orchestration of sorts that includes a variety of reds, yellows, blues, purples, greens and browns.

But the sequence of colours is what entices and excites because it doesn't appear to have been applied systematically. Instead, the distribution feels more or less intuitive —huddled hues placed so that no repetitive pattern is detectable, yet making randomness out of the question. There is within an equilibrium that is indeed finely tuned. And yet there is also a sense of illusion depending on the optical effect created by juxtaposed angles of colour. This invites the viewer into the abacus of abstractionist notions and sensibilities in this collection that embodies a colourative zest .Individual in its presence and its value, yet part of a harmonious palette that changes as one’s eyes travel over the whole lot this showcases abstraction in its zesty expressionist ethos.

With Mona Rai, darker impassioned reds and maroons your eyes actually seem to bulge, as you take in textural detailing but in her second work the effect is opposite there is a blurring of boundaries as if the handling of surface density has let other dictates dissolve. Still other areas lie perfectly flat in Dattaraya Apte’s handmade paper syncopations. Apte’s creation opens the floodgate of possibilities. Surface can be a number of probabilities inside, outside and beyond. What’s uncanny is that none of those dulcet deflections on the single surfaces is stable; as the rods and cones in your eye get saturated or fatigued, the differences between space and form shift.

The mood of minimalism and the feel of sun-bleached colors in Rooshika Patel’s works melds atmosphere with a nascent sense of Cubist space, here rendered as faceted forms of simple lines.

Those forms are quickly unhinged from describing recognizable objects in Jumble 3 and 4, the works of Manjari Chakravarti. The syncopated planes and shapes of geometric color that result seem like distant cousins in the works of Mekhala Bahl, except for an underlying sense of almost mathematical order. The horizontal striations somehow stencil softened hues into tall, angular shards of light that are like sunshine ricocheting off the crevices of a canyon wall.
The range of invention is impressive when you espie the works of Mithu Sen and Ranjith Raman. .While Raman works with embroidery to compose his comment Mithu Sen’s preoccupation with hair and the embellishment of feminine facades sets you thinking about socio-cultural observations.

One startling result of this show is that there are no identical compositions and the richness of intent lies in the variation and range of the chosen palettes of the artists included. The choice of cool colors for a striped format might make one painting seem to drift off into vast, almost dreamy spatial depths, while the warmer colors in the one next to it come blaring. Colour as a subject is effortlessly conveyed while texture is celebrated for its nuances in tonality and its viscous flavour when you look closely at the works of Neha Turakia.

Colour's boundless capacity as a material is also on display in the survey of fluorescent and non neon shades that couple the capacity for cohesive thinking. The principal difference is in the artists’ use of the traditional tools of paint and canvas as well as non-art ingredients like wool in Shobha Broota’s Radiance series that make you delve into the depth of creative zest.

In many ways robust painting is everywhere you look, colored pigment smeared on canvas stretched taut between strips of wood.

The show makes you think about — Clement Greenberg, the art critic who championed Color Field painting and its offspring, Lyrical Abstraction. On avant-garde issues, Greenberg was the foremost dismissive voice of establishment culture. Young artists were offering Conceptual and Post-Minimal art in opposition to his narrow doctrines, busily squashing the restrictive status quo, and painting got caught in the squeeze.

Enter Yashwant Deshmukh who uses the landscape of a temple to create an architectural dictate of credibility. In some ways you think of the exercise as one that seeks to go beyond extending tradition. Looking at the myriad surfaces and textures makes this show an indulgence for the eye and a pleasure for the brain.

It is also a convincing education to see that the slew of artists chosen for this coming together are not limited by prevailing trends — establishment or clan. They thrive on a recalcitrant mix of establishment resistance and progressive challenge. The degree of abstraction in this collection sets you musing about abstract trends. In retrospect, abstract painting, claimed as the purest and highest form of Modern art, collides with popular culture, and seems to be of a very different, very admirable mindset. Art is art, high or low, and the question for a democratic culture is not where it ranks on some aristocratic scale but how rich, provocative and compelling it is.

In that case, Dattaraya Apte’s works inject vernacular juice into abstract art, which after quarter of a century of astounding diversity and refinement had become mandarin, esoteric and dull. In his use of the materials dyed hand coloured pulp cast we see the embodiment of abstract painterly contradictions, like crossed electrical wires, which emit an illuminating jolt.

`Surfaces and Textures’ is the advent of an order of materiality and references. It is an outlet that allows fresh air to circulate through painting and meets the free play of expression that artistic venting encourages. Looked at from an isolation of a single work or among a group of works the paintings exude airiness and liquidity, but the only thing that's organic about their flow of colored pigments is that a controlling human intelligence has guided them.

The limpid blue brushstrokes of Kishore Shinde and the multicolored marks of most any other canvas are typically marked off by remnants of artistic gleanings. Culture, not nature, is what true art intensifies. Abstraction then is about an inner desire. It is an attraction to solitude, open space, subtle expressions of light and time ... Sometimes its lingua franca is about whiteness. Sometimes it's about darkness. We can be attracted to the darkness that flirts with the whiteness- it relieves us perhaps of the incessant call to visual attention, it opens interior spaces that offer untold possibilities of discovery. This darkness is another form of light when we look deeper into abstract possibilities.

It is in the variation of textures that you see the astonishing range and vibrancy of an unending palette. Though abstract, these canvases and paper works can evoke a host associations and metaphorical moorings; earth and foliage, swirling depths and mist, shimmering light and tidal flats sunset and sunrise, dawn and dusk in a sand ridden desert. We can look at surfaces and textures as "not landscape but land".
Yogesh Rawal’s collages are calm and more attentive and anchored to their rectangles, which they fill in orderly, squared-off fashion, with no loss of brute, fingernails-to-the-blackboard garishness. They layer and juxtapose a more sharply differentiated potpourri of grid-based networks, enlarged calligraphic episodes, sharp and round-shouldered shapes -- all conveyed in contrasting paint thicknesses and techniques and a palette of bright monochromes, interlaced primaries and black as he blends the cellulose, resin and the tissue to create an other worldliness rare and often unseen.
Off hand, spontaneity alternates with careful premeditation, as a series of preparatory drawings nearly identical to the final product attests. And flat-footed immediacy is leavened with historical allusion. Rawal’s methodical mixing, and weaving in of textural terrain, is just some of the references at work here.
The results are latter-day specific objects. The strongest idiom is the thick, midsize network overlaid with a burly black as well as more delicate scribbles and blocky shapes which bring to mind the circuitry and cell-like squares of world famous artist Peter Halley.
Rawal’s work reflects amply that the art world is knee-deep in feats of realism in both two and three dimensions, whether created by artists or by their assistants or by some form of technology. Rawal’s grey and black work seems, intriguingly atmospheric, seemingly air-brushed, mostly black and white and grey, but sometimes delicately coloured. This grey work looks like a geometric landscape in a broad spectrum of grainy grays... Rawal’s impartial record of tonal difference is delicately pulled apart into successive scrims of varying density. Somehow this recapitulation creates a poetic awareness of the passage of light, moving through the world, bouncing off things and making visual experience fleetingly possible.
Tapati Chodhury’s` Nylon String with Red Drips’ framed in a box is an example of painting away from Minimalist austerity toward something more explicitly expressionistic. Her signature device consists of an unusually covered surface, which curves in from top to bottom and out from side to side, with loose vertical strokes in a strong aerated color. She finishes the composition with an eyelike pair of flat, emphatic shapes in a second color.
Partly structural and partly representational, the bilaterally symmetrical results suggest someone painting with both hands at once -- with or without paintbrushes. The works force Minimalism's object awareness back toward something more essential, visionary and slightly more spatial in intent.

To be sure, the idea of surfaces and textures are also about a relaxed intensity — but that blend of casualness and focused skill is central to the gratifying pleasure of these works. Abstraction is play, these paintings insist, which is not to say trivial. On the contrary, art's gratuity — something given without claim or demand — is one of its most cherish able attributes. ‘Painting is colour and colour is painting.’ So said the artist John Copnall and so be it.

UMA NAIR