Sunday, June 14, 2020

If You Don’t See the Knees of the State on Floyd’s Neck in These Paintings What Else do you See?





Landscape art is the latest fad. It gives an artistic opportunity to express one’s flair for painting, concern for the environment and above all, one’s innate need to evade the immediate social crises. Hailed as a safe haven for many an artist, landscapes otherwise provide a vast vista for visual, aesthetical and philosophical contemplations. Technically speaking the body of works that I present here done by Prasad Kumar K.S, does not belong to the landscape category. At the same time it is not too far away from it either. As I look at them deeply the central imagery of a tree transforms and transcends into a symbolic form, a metaphor for a struggling human being as we have seen in the paintings and sculptures of Michelangelo, Francisco Goya, Auguste Rodin, Chittoprasad Bhattacharya and Prodosh Dasgupta.



What do you see here? The central imagery, that is a tree which is weighed down so forcefully by heavy loads and clamps fitted to concrete blocking, literally choking and blocking its natural growth. But the tree is as relentless and determined as its oppressors. It has determined to grow, though misshapen and twisted; but it does grow and finds the sky. At the tips of the branches lives the freedom and existence that the tree cherishes. With indomitable spirit it proves to the world that you can defeat but you cannot destroy a human being because he is driven by the perennial energy to survive, nourished by hope.



What do I see here in this tree painted by Prasad Kumar? I see the faces of all those people who walked back to their villages during the lock down days in India. Daring the brutalities and heartlessness of the State they braved the hostile distances. Reverse migration was it, said the sociologists but for the migrants it was their exodus to hope. Once they had left those barren villages thinking that they could make a life in the peripheries of urban spaces that they themselves would build. They had lost hope in their villages. They were oppressed by the caste realities and poverties. Dr.Ambedkar too had asked the downtrodden people to move to the cities to build their life in comparatively less oppressive urban spaces. Now they were walking back, once again showing their indomitable spirit of survival. Now they were seeing hope in the villages that they still deemed their mother.



What do I see in these paintings by Prasad Kumar? I see the face of innumerable Dalits in this country who are, at every step, asked to bow down or rather make way so that the upper castes could move forward. These trees, the protagonists in Prasad Kumar’s paintings are the metaphorical representation of the Indian Dalits who are part of the International Black Communities. Look at the way the trees struggle and look the way the upper caste rules gleefully pull them down, hold them back and confine them beyond movement, blocking all the possibilities of free growth. The most surprising thing about these paintings is the HOPE that they could emanate. And at the same time they show how the burdens of the past, caste, poverty, discrimination, criminalization and dispossession for ages weigh them down at each stage of their lives. But they do live on and flourish though distorted and twisted. One could feel the pain of such growth.



What do I see in these paintings? I see the face of Geroge Floyd who had been choked to death by the American Police. He was black and was his crime. Floyd’s death is the latest in the series of murders committed by the White state Police with racial superiority consciousness and innate hatred for the Blacks. ‘I can’t Breath’, the last words uttered by Floyd under the pressing knees of the policeman have become the refrain of the protesting people from all over the world, who are now shaking the citadels of the brutal rulers. Along with Corona, the world has divided into two, before Floyd and after Floyd. The camps and weights in that you see in Prasad Kumar’s paintings are the metaphorical knees of oppression and racial hatred prevalent for centuries.

-JohnyML

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