Master-stroke!- Uma Nair,THE HINDU

Compositions, styles, narratives, contextualisation and sensibilities all give way to a feast for the senses. New York-based Zarina Hashmi, the distinguished Satish Gujral , the think tank Krishen Khanna, seasoned photographer Ram Rahman and autobiographical Anju Dodiya. These five artists defined different practices and materials in terms of technique and sensibility as it traversed years as early as 1981 to 2018, at the India Art Fair.

Satish Gujral’s burnt wood sculpture

Chawla Art Gallery presents Satish Gujral’s solo showing at their booth. While Gujral has a broad sweep of mediums and materials and techniques over more than six decades of work, it is his burnt wood sculptures that stand at the zenith of a sensibility that is both rare and deeply sensitive even as it hints at mythology as well as spirituality.

Ideas divide and forms unite when you think of artists who belong to the graph of India’s masters. And Gujral’s Untitled burnt wooden sculpture (oil on burnt wood, leather, cowrie shells, beads on plyboard) is a cynosure for all eyes for the many worlds and materials it straddles and transcends. There is something hauntingly Indianesque in this work, although he has consciously refused to exploit traditional Indian styles but instead gone for universality of idioms in his creations. Perhaps this quality lies in the dry burnt wooden colour, charcoaled in essence and gritty, that is dragged across the surface to create a folded biomorphic matte finish texture.

His sculpture is most impressive and carries with it a vintage vitality when you understand how the subtleties of colour begin to play across this harsh surface like hints of a myth that plays out in a dry desert. But this sculpture from an early period has an elusive quality even as it leads you into the profundity of commentaries as you attempt to grasp its ethos that flits through time and space. The sculpture with its fluid detailing speaks to us about what is transient and tangential, the sacred and the sublime so that eventually the seeming solidity dissolves into sliding planes of contours that make for a resonance that delves deep into the mapping of histories.

Krishen Khanna’s Bandwallah

Palette Art Gallery has a collection of Indian masters and Krishen Khanna’s Bandwallah is a crimson tide creation that satiates your inner recesses. It reminds you of the power of music in our lives and the imperative of music in the ritual of the wedding. It was in the 1970s that Khanna first explored the subject of Bandwallas, or members of local brass bands engaged to play at weddings and other public ceremonies. Krishen once told me, “While driving out of my Delhi studio, the path was blocked by the marching band of a wedding procession – this is how I came to paint the first Bandwalla portraits.”

“The image of these musicians dressed in scarlet with their big brass instruments wrapped around them still remains as powerful for me today as it was that day in Delhi. The Bandwallas became a recurrent theme in my oeuvre. My choice of subject has either been inspired by the experiences of the daily life and pathos of the common man or from literature or the Holy Books. The Bandwallas are an everyday sight all across the country, they are comic and bold and his portrayal of them is superb in terms of their bright colourful uniforms and brass buttons right down to their often tired expressions as they belt out the same tunes repeatedly for one wedding procession after another,” reminisced Krishen. This vibrant canvas will fill the viewer with nostalgia and make us ponder about their lives.

Zarina Hashmi’s Homecoming

One cannot not miss Zarina Hashmi’s fascinating cast paper work “Homecoming 1981” at the Gallery Espace Booth. The small, grey toned monochromatic yet minimalist Zen aesthetic is a resonance we can’t avoid. She is known for conceiving an intuitive aesthetic with a restraint that is both tranquil and sombre.

There is austerity and starkness in her articulation, but there is also an intense clarity of tone and warmth of timbre. Her visual translation of the four cornered quartet concept encapsulates a narrative of experience, and memory, with the homecoming event. She alludes abstract emotions as well as a fleeting feeling with an economy of expression that is unique and subtle.

In this monochrome presence, we glimpse her passion for geometry. In 2005, at her show in Singapore, she told me that geometry, is an “ongoing sacred practice”. Indeed, her works are a litany of geometric forms: the square, the circle and the triangle. Resolutely rooted in Indo-Persian traditions through abstracted images and forms as well as Urdu poetry and personal history this work unveils a different realm.

Ram Rahman’s imagery

Ram Rahman’s images of artists at The Guild are the stuff of candour and caprice. Ram, the ace architectural photographer, who captures monuments and buildings across the world becomes a historian when he turns his lenses on India’s contemporary artists. Among the many captivating moments two of them are epic in terms of expression and the distinctive moment. Francis Newton Souza at his home in New York 1998 as well as Bhupen Khakar 1985 are images that enchant as well as engage us for their brilliance of the inimitable momentousness that assails our senses.

Souza sits chatting in his amiable provocative manner and we see in the background the French door of his apartment in which you see many of his drawings. If Souza’s portrait is animated Bhupen Khakar’s posture and poise as he sits within the space of Gandhi’s statue in Delhi is an arresting and meticulously rendered, masterful print. Bhupen was a father figure to many and in seating him in the lap of the Father of the Nation, Ram invites viewers to peruse the expression of demure softness on Bhupen’s face.

Ram employs naturality and elegant simplicity of black and white idiom and the Gandhi statue to pose his subject, the petite Bhupen as his a model. It is Ram’s distinct aesthetic that defines the 20th Century elegance and simplicity of style, with each brilliant image beautifully articulating his subjects who are indeed personas in the world of contemporary Indian art.

With both, Ram achieves a characteristic balance of the playful with the sombre, the visual with the thoughtful, and the deeply personal with the thirst of wants from the public.

Anju Dodiya’s matresses

Chemould Presscot from Mumbai brings in its melange Anju Dodiya’s work. The artist visualises themes of sleep and night in some of her mattress-as-canvas as well as watercolour and charcoal on unbleached fabric stretched on padded board.

‘Room with a view’ reflects monumentality and precise attention to detail. Complementing motifs and themes already present in life she remains rooted in the figurative and her works are evocative echoes of an emotive elegance unique to her artistic language. Recurring in changing pictorial contexts is the artist herself.

“Mattresses belong to the domestic terrain and here I continue to explore their surface as a base to paint images of home, dream and body,” states Dodiya. “Desires and aspirations are just a flip second away from the real. The process of staining and marking with watercolour and charcoal on the resistant unbleached cotton is playful. The geometric shapes and lines reference the modernist minimal art of the ‘70s, while the elements of the lamp (after Carlo Mollino) and the landscape (after the Italian primitives) betray my attitude of devouring images from diverse sources and spilling them onto my work.”

This triptych is an inward looking investigation with a unique sense of self-awareness and introspection. She compels the viewer to unravel untold stories of the (usually) female protagonists, yet does not quite reveal the entire narrative. She creates her own legends mirrored as self-disruptive autobiographies. Her paintings start a process of moving beyond the narrow self and towards a greater investigation into one’s selfhood. They are more than mere pictorial quotations phrased across years, they are expressions of strong psychological continuities. Her allegorical narratives represent the inherent theatricality that mediates between the real and the illusory.