Reflections on the The EDGE…

Reflections on the The EDGE…


I
M. Sashidharan is one of the privileged ones from the generation of artists who witnessed the ripe phase of the narrative school of Baroda and the many enactments of the then active Radical Group. Being in Vadodara, at this crucial juncture, as a student, enabled him to observe art practices critically but with a certain cynicism. Early works from this period betray vulnerability and anguish of the artist. But with the passing years and with more intimate engagements with the art practice, Sashidharan arrives with a distinct flair in contemporary art, which is as much private as it is public.
Apart from being a practicing artist, Sashidharan has been teaching at the prestigious faculty of fine arts, of the M.S. University of Baroda. He has been instrumental in initiating young minds to the intricacies of the world of art, without bringing in any mystification. I had the privilege to be his student for some years; and know that, he has been a teacher who, (as Henri Matisse has said of Gustave Moreau) ‘...did not set us on the right roads but off the roads. He disturbed our complacency.’ In the following essay, I have tried to distance myself critically, for me to be able to put his work in a proper perspective.

II
Sashidharan has been exhibiting his works regularly since 1987, either in group or solo shows. His pictorial language has evolved from a realistic narrative base. He has dramatically explored and exploited its possibilities, to give it a subjective mark. His work at the show in 1988 reveals the play of multiple narratives, accentuated colours and exaggerated figuration. These works employ known imagery, but are infused with the strange perception of the artist. They are peopled frames of panoramic landscapes, but carry the light of a private symbolism. During this time, the artist also read Latin American literature (esp. the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez) so the tone of ‘magical reality’ does not escape from his expressions. In these works, his emphasis on the mundane life of a common man and his struggles for existence, all show acute class-conscious expressions of the proletarian.

In subsequent years, the visual imagery of his work undergoes transformation. The panoramic landscapes fade, colours become monochromatic and the narrative is broken in to overlapping discrete images. The characters do not have a direct relationship with political-social issues; instead they are placed in a more complex, more critical, more trivial experience of the self in an existential crisis. The artist in these works begins to explore the experience of making marks, erasures and over writings. These have been portrayed more evidently in his drawings of this period.
This approach of making overlapping images soon becomes more selective and distinct. For a brief period, Sashidharan makes images of mundane objects. These objects, like a thumb pin, a tea cup, a bench etc. of our daily use are depicted with a tenderness usually reserved to higher organic life. The artist thus looks into private life of things. During this time he also looks more intimately at the body as a site, where he explores the experience of sensuousness attached to it. Also he attempts to understand the nature of the experience of touch, of dreaming and of being seized in nightmares.
This is the time when one finds a few distinct images becoming the repertoire of the artist, his signature. They are images of a head, of lonely figures, of exotic flora and fauna; creating an imprint of an inner geography of the self. The head lying on ground, quiet and subsumed in its stillness; there are wandering human figures in strange landscapes, there are sharp-animated exotic flora on barren lands and there are abundant damp marshy lands in twilight. This imagery becomes consistent metaphors of the inner life, the wounds which one always wants to evade. To summarize his preoccupations, a work entitled: ‘Cage’ is a good example, where an image of a shadowed branch in an empty cage conveys an experience of confinement, isolation and stunted growth.
Simultaneously, the artist has also worked in Glass, exploring its possibilities as a potential medium of expression. For sometime he completely gets engrossed in experiments and begins to exploit the attribute of light in relationship to textured and coloured glass. This engagement enables him to employ a different visual grammar, resulting in works closer to patterns and quasi-decorative shapes, occupying a definite place in indoor or outdoor architecture. Being primarily a painter, his association with this medium leads to works that utilize the attributes of both the mediums.

III
Some events of the last few years in our history have deeply affected our perception of reality. The drastic changes in Social-Political-Cultural configurations have affected us without prior intimation, we are not only a witness to them, but are answerable to their consequences. Day in and day out, we suffer from a sense of guilt. Our own systems have overpowered us and we have all been blindfolded by the hypocrisy of language. The relationship between projection and interpretation of appearances has become illusive and critical. And the realisation of its triviality has resulted in unrest among all individuals with empathy, living in our time. This has inevitably made us to rethink our pre-assumptions, ideologies and methodologies. It has now become crucial to ask, some simple questions: What is to ‘paint?’ What is to ‘make an image?’ What is it to ‘read/appreciate an artwork?’
Sashidharan addresses these issues aggressively and intimately, employing his language with a renewed interest. On enlarged pictorial surfaces forms appear sharpened, improvised and illuminated from within. He confronts his ‘self’ without sympathy or holds no hope from fragile optimism. His fascination for the plurality of language has created newer puns and sarcastic remarks. All woven into the varied textures of the visual history of art, he has created discrete narratives, an assemblage of spectacles; the works on display are such sites.
In the present show, the artist re-establishes his relationship with different strategies of constructing narratives; the theatricality of his early works is re-visited. Animated-exaggerated forms, painted in discord produce consciously manoeuvred sites as spectacles. In ‘Maze’, the picture is made up of three distinct parts of different sizes. The first part is a burnt plank, dark-raw wood; the second is of thrice the size of the first, featuring a deep rift cutting vertically across the landscape and the third is the larger and the more crucial part; it is covered with a wild plant. These bushes coloured in four different tones act as a fence/hedge/pattern. Through its interstices, the artist dramatically connects the viewer to the world overlapped by growing urbanization; the life of labour-peasantry-oppressed in its shadow. Apart from creating a visual balance, each part, a black plank or a rift, both contribute to the total impact of the subject; it accentuates our experience of alienation.
For the last many years, Sashidharan has been referring to the natural world, and more eloquently so in recent times. Differently positioned in varied contexts, either by concealing or revealing, he poses acute arguments. Dramatic in representation, these exotic flora and fauna acquires a strange character, perhaps as props. On seeing them, one is tempted to ask: why natural forms? Juxtaposing with the grave, a rose partly concealed, what do you make of it? Against a depleting starry night sky, what is putting up a tension and creating rift between innocuous natural forms, and transforming them into cosmic spectacle for the human curiosity? Sculpted and painted in accentuate form, the ‘Angel’s Trumpet’, a wild flower with a sacred name! What does it convey? One wonders for the answers, perhaps in some indefinite moment, in the backdrop of wild urbanization, one may realize the significance of such enactments.
The works entitled: ‘Barcode’, ‘The Corporate’ and ‘... He drove the lion away’, ironically refer to man’s unquenched thirst for material accumulation, in the time of globalization. In ‘Barcodes’, the Baan Sayya- the bed of arrows, here becomes the bed of Barcodes, turning the means of better life into tragedy. Against the mesmerizing sky, the ultramarine blue of the bowl in the hand consoles the viewer, when interpreted as the little nectar of wisdom. ‘The Corporate’ is a more direct configuration of symbols. It signifies through the burning branch, the gesture of hand and the crisp usage of space, a fired-greedy-manipulator’s mindset underneath his sophisticated formal attire.
Amongst all the works in show, the ‘... He drove the lion away’, culminates Sashidharan’s chiseled sensibility of making puns through coalescing verbal and visual icons. Against a vast black backdrop, the emergence of a pillar is dramatic; it is enthroned by a figure of a man with a whip in his hand. The heightened and caricatured rendering of the figure creates a dark humor and enigma. All placed well on the proscenium, the play has come to an end and the protagonist is waiting for the curtains to drop. By making ones own mockery, the artist makes the impossible to happen through this fictitious enactment. In an attempt to read it closely, one tends to laugh and moan at the same time.
Terrorism, Violence, Communal Riots are the few synonyms of one and the same thing. The works entitled, ‘their Garden..’, ‘Shots/Shoots’ and ‘Gandhi Must Walk’ symbolically evoke the oppressions of our dark times, it is the life in the shadow of progress, globalization and multiculturalism. All of these three works employ different mediums and languages. In ‘their Garden..’, upon the dripping washes of lighter tones, Sashidharan places obscure images of a Scissor, a Water Sprinkler, a pattern of moonlike discs and a few ambiguous marks and shapes. These footholds (a few reminders) move the viewer across the abundant/deserted landscape leaving him cold and desolate.
The ‘Shots/Shoots’ is a work with sharp double edges, perhaps an elegy in visual icons. Here is a canvas painted in blue wash, sandwiched between two burnt black plywood panels. The agonized fallen figures painted in urgency on canvas enhanced by the penetrating shots/Shoots, what do they constitute? Are shoots nurtured to breed hope? Is it a memorial resurrected in the memory of victims? Or is it a reminder to our conscience?
Being in Gujarat, in the state of Gandhi’s birth, occasionally witnessing communal upheavals and listening to the all-praise songs of communal harmony and peace, one is tempted to question the long cherished belief systems. The ‘Gandhi Must Walk’ is the result of Sashidharan’s long time fascination for the icon of Mahatma Gandhi and its circulation/ presence amidst encroaching vandalism. In past, just after the Godhra Carnage, in solidarity with the artist’s protest against violence/communalism, he had produced some works. To contextualize the anguish, he had employed an image of a foot entwined in barbed wire, an image from the deteriorated/abandoned monumental sculpture of Gandhi, by late Sankho Chaudhary. Almost after four years, the threat of the time deepens the anguish; the artist’s desperation multiplies into a duplication of the image. These images put together resonate artist’s faith amidst the overpowering forces. Earlier, Sashidharan had quoted a fragment from Grunewald’s Crucifix, a nailed hand on the lid of a coffin. This disfigured hand invoked a sense of guilt and pain. Similarly again after years, the artist reinstates his voice, he makes Gandhi Walk stridently by his own will. As is in the ‘Barcode’, the Bowl illuminates with the nectar of wisdom, so here also: Gandhi Must Walk!

IV
Finally, I would end with an image of a roadside knife sharpener, who would regularly visit our Chawl and ask for the blunt tools to be sharpened, with his leg-operated machine. He would sharpen the smaller ones on the roadside and ask for the bigger ones to be sent to the workshop. He would sharpen them by heating and beating them red hot. Sashidharan seems to be the one doing the same, but differently. He sharpens the forms and concepts with similar ease, making them double edged; so that they can pierce through our new found, slick conscience disturbing our comfort zone. The edge need to remain sharp…not dark and blunt.

Piyush A. Thakkar.