(Navanshu Kumar, artist)
Navanshu Kumar, a young artist based in Khairagarh/Bhilai
(incidentally he is also a final year MFA Painting student in the ISKVV, aka
Khairagarh University) prefers to call a spade a spade. If anyone asks him why
his canvases and installations do not have this ‘beauty’ component in him, he immediately
chips in with an answer; according to him the idea of beauty has been debated
at various levels and a contemporary painter perhaps does not live in that
notion of beauty. In the ideal world that the artists of the yester years had
been trying to realize beauty could have dwelled safely but today with a fast
changing world in hand the very idea of ideal has been lost. Hence, it becomes
imperative for any creative artist to look beyond the idea of beauty and
perfection, and engage him/herself with the world, comprehend and express it as
it suits to him. Seen against this backdrop, Navanshu’s paintings are ‘a-paintings’
or ‘anti-paintings’ carrying the historical dilemma of all the painters in the
post-Duchampian art world where each one is destined to with an anti-painting
or create an ‘a-painting’ using the age old language of painting itself!
(work by Navanshu)
In such negotiations, any artist including Navanshu makes a
tight rope walking while creating a painting using a painterly language and remains
constantly conscious of the fact of tumbling down into the realm of pure
painting with all its idealism-baggage. It is exactly the way the radicals use
the language of authority against the authority in order to topple it. When
they assume power they could either re-articulate the language of power and
authority or could extend the language of hegemony as an act of perpetuation.
The danger of such perpetuation is this that it not only maintains the linguistic
authority but also it facilitates a change in the approach of the user (here
the radicals) and makes them as good or bad as the authorities in the previous
regimes. Duchamp had saved himself from the tyranny of painting while resorting
to the painterly language that was vogue in those days (cubist-expressionistic)
before he completely shifted to the usage of readymade objects as works of art
or as components of the works. The Abstract Expressionists of America had also
tried to move away from painting but ironically became the new age purists
thanks to the theoretical formulations of Clement Greenberg. Picasso was
perhaps one artist who successfully juggled various creative languages and
including that of painting but transcended all kinds of purism (even he did not
allow his cubist experiments to be purist in nature).
(work by Navanshu)
Navanshu lives in a country where artists are pressed to do painting
‘also’ by the gallerists despite their success in other mediums and
expressions. Artists making huge steel or bronze installations are expected to
make small scale paintings to satisfy various market forces. I am not
overlooking the fact that artists at time feel the compulsions from within to
do various forms of art using various mediums. While accepting that I would
also maintain that the paintings done by such artists would become dead weight
in their later career provided the character of the art market changes for
good. However, for the time being the tunnel is endless and no light is seen
for even a shredded painting could be further auctioned only because it has
been shredded live in a well-choreographed prank. Hence, a young artist who is hardly
23 years old would feel the pressure of the market sooner than later; chances
are more that his anti-paintings would be re-dubbed as pure paintings and the
style that he has developed so far would need its own sophistication. That is
not a bad thing to do for the artist has to live in a society where the
communication currency is nothing but money. Therefore Navanshu’s entry into
the art market may not surprise anyone (even if it would be via residencies or
biennales or primarily buy small time buyers and finally via galleries) and as
an art critic my critical gaze is currently placed on him to see which
direction he would take in a few years’ time.
(work by Navanshu)
One may by now be wondering why I call the paintings of
Navanshu, anti-paintings. They are anti-paintings because they move drastically
different in theme and style from the mainstream painterly practices of the
day. There was a time (especially from 2000 to 2014) when every young artist in
the country painted images that were mediatized in one or the other way. They
all followed the so called contemporary synthetic style of photorealism that at
once established the Renaissance Illusionism while extolling the possibilities
of glossy two-dimensionality, almost denying the presence of any kind of depth
of history. The Renaissance illusionism was used as a benchmark of the skill of
the artist in question and the flatness was to be seen as his/her ability to
articulate the contemporary discourse (which was absolutely shallow with
artists with half-baked knowledge or google driven information posing
themselves as the champions of the world issues which are immediately
recognized thanks to their entry into multiple discourses via words, pictures
and moving images). Navanshu breaks away from this shallowness and delves deep
into a sort of expressionism that primarily captures people and places in the
most unlikely fashion while problematizing his own relationship with art
history at various levels.
(work by Navanshu)
Navanshu’s expressionism may look familiar in the initial
look but one could see the deliberate imbalances that he has created through
the application of colors and the distortion of the images. While some of them
look absolutely stock images culled from a book of caricatures, a second look
would reveal that they are not stock characters at all and this aspect is
underlined by the strangeness that the artist attributes to each of them
through their almost blind (or all seeing?) disproportionate eyeballs and the
general aloofness of posture. They look like the remnants of a war, a
devastation, perhaps they look like people from a different existential plane
whose denial has become the logic of our sane existence on the face of the
earth. Navanshu has painted the portrait of around nine aliens; the title is
deliberately misleading for the onlooker could immediately launch him/herself
into the search for the aliens that he/she is familiar with. But for me, they
are people around us whose alien face that we refuse or fail to see. Francis
Newton Souza had done it when he painted six gentlemen from our times. They were
not caricatures or representative figures; but they were more than real and
affirmative. Navanshu’s aliens stand at par with those gentlemen of Souza.
(work by Navanshu)
A young artist from any part of the world at the beginning
of his career would definitely think (or his thought may traverse) about the
aspect of madness; not only of his own madness but also of that manifested in
others. Art history lauds those artists who had gone mad but had done good
paintings; it also praises those artists who had chosen low life as well as the
lower middle class life. Navanshu seems to agree with all these dictums of art
history but he keeps himself off so far from depicting female or male nudity
which I believe is a conscious stance against the cannons of art history (while
I see many of his contemporaries conjure up various emblematic representations
for/of nude females, especially in a time when nudes are not so really
entertained on canvases and papers). I am not particularly excited by this
aspect seen in Navanshu but I see that restrain as another possibility of
taking his art to a dispassionate dimension where he could deal with the
political realities of today in a more existential and experiential manner as
he has already repudiate the ideal ‘beauty’ concept which often comes hand in
hand with the nude paintings or female body in general.
(Stupid common man/every morning by Navanshu)
What Navanshu takes interest in is the field of madness.
According to my reading, Navanshu sees madness as another language (I do not
know whether he is clearly a Freudian or Lacanian in this sense) which could
offer us a different reality, which could be more real that the apparent
reality itself. He captures this language of madness through his emblematic
presentation of figures and characters that include his much debated painting, ‘Stupid
Common Man’; a Kafkaesque maze that he invites us into and leave us there to
negotiate the space for ourselves. This could be one reason why Navanshu’s mad
people look just as normal as we are with only different reflecting in the
bulbous shiny eyes that we see externalized in these images while we keep them
safe within us. Madness is a different order which is against the mainstream
norms therefore the mad people were send across sees to the alien shores where
they were expected to die a dismal death. The idea of Ship of Fools, explained
by Foucault in his ‘Madness and Civilization’ shows us how people are
transported to a different reality for harboring a different reality in
themselves. The restoration of socio-political and moral order in a society by
sending the vagrants and the mad to alien shores and islands is what we see
today in a different way in the case of the migrants all over the world. They
are being constantly sent to different places; some are even forced to live in
vessels moored in strange seas for long; they are called the boat people. What
Foucault had said comes back to us in a different way, an open political
decision and discourse. Navanshu gets these people not as boat people but as
people with no lands. There are efforts to politicize Navanshu’s works as he
opens it up in one of the conversations.
(work by Navanshu)
One of the recent installations done by Navanshu shows a
series of curved roof tiles locally made and baked being painted into masks and
were displayed in a series on the wall of a village house. According to
Navanshu, these tiles are human faces (besides they are called ‘masks’) that
cover themselves to hide the reality that they carry with them. The villages
are changing fast; the people are changing; there are mass migrations to the
cities from these areas; the ones who have made some wealth in the cities are
making concrete houses back home, changing the character and complexion of the
villages. But they all put a brave face before these changes. The villages
around Navanshu are in their transitory state; they may fade in the coming
years. The masks therefore become the masks of a Grecian tragedy relating the
chronicles of massive crisis. This in variable dimensions could merge with any
village in the northern part of India and tell the stories of the people there
without playing the representational game. The changes in such sylvan villages
are not externally imposed; each one wants to take part in the idea of
development and they fail to notice what they are losing fast. The common man
as usual remains stupid, comprehending it as a high amount of intelligence and
reveling in it. Navanshu, as an artist is currently with them to chronicle
those tales of tragi-comedies. But I am sure Navanshu has to move to a
different world to shape his art further up. He could be looked at by the
curators and galleries in India and elsewhere for he could not only make his
anti-paintings but could articulate them verbally too.
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