Portraying altered urban landscape and mindscape
Painting a jovial picture of lusty life does not appeal an increasing breed of restless Indian artists who now wield a paintbrush to peel off the bright coats and reveal the true colors of life.
Scratching the surface of seemingly tempting and tantalizing metro life, they uncover the sullenness that lies beneath.
The rapid forces of urbanization have resulted in increased insecurities and alienation, which is a matter of reflection and contemplation to several Indian artists. They choose to pour out their pent-up feelings on canvas, in the process, sharing their sense of isolation and emotional deprivation, essentially a personal experience, and ironically, an all pervasive one.
A number of artists try to delve into the phenomenon of changed urban landscape and mindscape, in an effort to understand the changed contexts and concepts of urban life that has undergone a complete metamorphosis. They are looking to establish a correlation between consumerism and individualism – both byproducts of urbanization. The tone is not necessarily of utter dejection; it’s not cynical, rather satirical.
Artist N.S. Harsha’s intricately detailed canvasses juxtapose seemingly disassociated images of scenes of small town and village India with those of more recognizably international ones. His multi-layered narratives strongly suggest that the global is always already located within the local imagination.
Each painting functions like a theatrical tableau with actors, props, scenery and backdrop, or rather, like the elements in model boxes of the kind that theatre designers use to simulate the stage on a miniature scale; the artist himself describes these spaces as court rooms where things are brought together to be judged.
Works by Nikhileswar Baruah place the human figure against a backdrop of an urban landscape: tall buildings and a sea of mill chimneys emitting grey smoke. He has created a sense of vast space in which the idea of alienation in a crowd of many is evoked. Human figures and portraits of imaginary men presented as if staring from hoardings have become integral to his works. Hoardings are part of the city dweller’s experience; the artist treats them as an ironic metaphor.
A series of close-up portraits adorn neutral expressions akin to faces of glamorous models. He leaves these facial expressions open to interpretation – they could be expressions of equanimity or apathy. They train their gaze upon us, like the chiseled-face models who stare at us from enormous hoardings to gain access into our mind. Sometimes his characters train their eyes away from us on to an object, compelling us to follow the trail of their sight. It seems these men yearn to rise above the din of the cityscape.
Artist Alok Bal probes into the issue and the icons of urbanization like the undulating landscapes that have completely changed into construction sites. His large landscapes - the evidences of displacement - yearn for inhabitation but are left frozen in time. The dumping grounds of the city authority have given way to construction sites where the soil itself has the synthetic content or in the artist’s own words, is the “synthetic landscape”. Here a mutation and preservation is happening simultaneously.
Most of the pictures contain no human figure. But traces of humanity are everywhere in these scenes of roads, planted fields, telephone poles, shelters of different kinds and houses (sometimes under construction, their materials displayed like letters in some invasive alphabet). These sites are anything but urban, but you know somehow that the city is never far away – that these are edges borders, zones of demarcation.
The ubiquitous human figure and simple objects recur in Arunanshu Chowdhury’s works in a different context. The subject matter of his canvases is usually a take on various events that have an impact our lives – directly or indirectly, subtly or severely. These pass through the sieve of the artist’s perception, and form the basis of his creations.
Recent creations by artist Santosh More also delve into urban landscape and mindscape. The artist chooses to face harsh urban realities. Much of it is defined by architecture and so also the obsession with a modernist aesthetic of ‘less is more’. It is part of the larger agenda of globalization, as the artist perceives it who tries to interpret the urban psyche and the order that replicates and reflects the fears and anxiety of the city life.
Lost in the urban landscape, the artist yearns for tranquility. He preserves the memories of the rural landscape and tries to retain and recreate the memories of nature on a canvas- like the act of leafing through the forgotten logs of a personal diary. His preoccupation with motifs of organic forms that resemble whorls, butterfly wings etc is a testimony to his keenness to hold on to the fragile feelings.
Collectively, these artists strive to portray the altered landscape and mindscape of a present metropolitan city.
