(Artist, Abir Karmakar)
They are titled ‘History Paintings’. Slightly more than a
foot in size these oil on canvas-paintings by Abir Karmakar, exhibited online
in the GallerySKE platform, exude the cold neutrality of our times and their
visual representations with edges blunted out of repeated mediating via various
digital interfaces. They are history paintings because they frame the incidents
that had happened in the recent, therefore contemporary history of the pandemic
hit India. At the same time, they dispute the very conventional idea of history
in which magnificent incidents find articulations in superlative terms, pushing
the marginal events out of its frames. History is often created out of heroes.
In this suite of paintings, history becomes applicable only in the context
where the conventional history and these paintings share a sense of tragedy.
(History Paintings I and II by Abir Karmkar)
Tragedies affect people only when the heroic qualities of
the protagonist in a narrative are forced collapse and the redemption seems to
be keeping itself away because of the subconscious follies committed by the
hero himself and the clever scheming of the antagonists around him. The fall of
the hero brings in a sense of catharsis, leading to the purgation of ill wills
and non-sublime feelings among the people who witness the tragedy. But here in
the paintings of Karmakar, the scope of such tragic evolution is considerably
curtailed due to the very repetition of a series of tragedies of the people who
do not have any heroic qualities, and overlapping of sequential tragedies
nullifying the previous ones with the unimaginable ferocities. Or it looks like
that. But a curious perusal of the events depicted in this body of works
perhaps would suggest a re-thinking about it.
(History Painting III and IV by Abir Karmakar)
True, the events and the embedded tragedies, due to its
relentless repetition as mediatized spectacles, have been rendered cold,
failing to eke out cathartic responses from the people who follow the events
through/by/in various mediums. The closeness of the devices in which the
tragedies are perceived also has diminished the complex nuances of such a
national tragedy, making it a repeatable, replay-able and troll-able (for
evocative purposes only for the time being) spectacle. But what Karmakar does
in this body of small paintings is something that brings the tragic weight back
into the events that have otherwise lost their gravity. The protagonists of
irrelevance in the national discourse of health and security, easily
dispensable errand workers whose pain has never been a concern of the making of
a contemporary nation and its resurgent nationalism and economy, military might
and so on, are made into real tragic heroes by focusing his artistic attention
on them.
(History Painting V and VI by Abir Karmakar)
The choice of canvas and its size is pivotal in this
discourse. They are small and done in oil. Size is what makes the viewer move
physically; the smallness of it would bring the patrons and viewers closer to
the works to ‘enjoy’ the cold pain that has been immortalized in the
traditionally accepted medium of grandeur; oil on canvas. The insignificant
subjects in the form of the migrant laborers, the abandoned spaces, the sanitation
workers, ensnared laborers in the open under the blaring sunlight, man terrorized
by the mere presence of policemen, social distancing made into reality through
the spatial regimentation made out of chalk circles, closed shutters, empty
railway stations and so on assume grandeur and magnificence like the historical
settings in a literary genre of tragedy. Karmakar proves that history paintings
need not necessarily be grand but small and significant through a special
perspective.
(History Painting VII and VIII by Abir Karmakar)
However, whose perspective is this that the artist is able
to replicate in his paintings? None can particularly locate the origin of these
pictures for many or almost everyone in the nation has seen them in this or
similar angles, highlighting the same tragedy of the migrant laborers and
places under precautionary lockdown. In history everything happens first as
tragedy and then as farce. Each illogically rude punitive blow fell on the
starved bodies of the people became a farcical repetition of the same ruthless
event that evoked only subconscious reflexive jerks among the people who could
stay ‘wherever they were’. Hence, the perspective of the paintings belongs to
the unknown or unacknowledged photographers who have either published them in
the media or dumped them in the social media.
(History Painting IX and X by Abir Karmakar)
Karmakar not only adopts the images but also borrows the
perspective of the photographer who created those images, which in the domain
of artistic ethics is not a big issue (unless some photographer or agency comes
up and raises a copyright issue). The real contribution of the artist here is
the way he has rendered them and the choice of size and medium as I explained
before. The treatment of color vis-à-vis the generic style of Karmakar is
entirely different, emphasizing a sort of detachment from the very subject in
order to avoid the indulgence of sentimentalism in his works. He has removed
the real time from the works through the peculiar use of color which falls
between ‘colorful’ and ‘black and white’. That is an interim time of either the
gaudy space of Eastman color or the ill-processed pictures of early analogue
color films. The removal of time earned through this color treatment makes the
painting ‘historical’ as something exemplary denoting its efficiency to
represent state’s impudence and ruthlessness anytime and anywhere in the world.
(History Painting XI and XII by Abir Karmakar)
I would like to mention one more point regarding the
practice of the artist, Karmakar so far. Perhaps, it is the time that has
prompted him to take up such a series which otherwise in his scheme of
paintings would be something alien and unthinkable. The pandemic has brought
many to a different track of thinking; basically about people around us. The
invisible became visible though many did not want it to be so. Mere charities
wouldn’t have alleviated their terrible experiences and plights. Set upon in a
re-thinking mode, many an artist has trained their eyes from the interiors to
the exteriors of their concerned existences. Karmakar has been an inward
looking person with an eye for his own self and could be easily called a
painter of his subjective interiority both in the spiritual/identity related
and corporeal terms. The pandemic has, temporarily perhaps, made him to look
outside not perhaps through a frame of his own subjective perspective but as
seen by somebody, efficient enough to capture the fact of the time. Erased off
of all sentimentalities and exaggerations in which the country as well as the
world revel in these days, Karmkar in this body works has been able to create art
which in fact is ‘Pre-Truth’ in nature and by using a different kind of ‘mediatized
realism.’
-JohnyML
