The timing cannot be better; Apurba Nandi’s solo exhibition
titled ‘A Parade of Uncertain Destinations’ at Delhi’s Palette Art Gallery is
right there at a historical juncture. With the images of the faceless and
hapless people falling off from the landing gears of the rescue flights in the
skies of Afghanistan fresh in memory, the faceless masses that mill around and
about in pre-destined patterns in Nandi’s paintings look like fresh wounds that
refuse to heal. These images of the human beings dig further into our
collective memory that has by now reconciled with the atrocities meted out to
the urban poor who were made to flee while the authorities asked them to ‘stay
where they were’ during the pandemic lockdown days.
(Painting by Nandi)
Meaning of a work of art largely depends on the
readerly/viewerly intentions. One could take the works of Nandi for happy
abstractions made out of human-like pigments a la late Chuck Close. Someone
else could also take them for politicized citizenry invested with
constitutional rights and protections that it assures. The age old theory of
urban spaces being a flux where identities merge creating ‘unmarked’ bodies may
not hold much water these days, especially after the onset of the pandemic that
has changed urbans spaces more controlled, regimented, marked out, surveilled
and if need be subjugated as per the needs of the authoritarian governments.
(Painting by Nandi)
In Nandi, these human parades occur as a result of the
lockdown woes. These works, I believe, embody an unresolvable helplessness of
the artists’ destiny, which is not a collective destiny at all as common
pursuits towards a single goal is never imagined or achieved through creative
works but for the time being artists cannot but think of the human redemption
from this unavoidable viral trap. The fate that has fallen upon the milling
masses with whom the identification cannot go beyond the level of sympathizing through
empathetic visualization, which is ironically a distant and still distancing
way of engagement with the perils that are experienced by someone else, is
never the fate of the artists in general. It is where the helplessness of the
artists comes in; they could register the pain in their own terms or just be
the callous witnesses.
(Painting by Apurba Nandi)
Whose parade are we witnessing while looking at the
largescale paintings of Nandi displayed on the walls of a gallery? And whose
uncertain destinies are they encapsulate in precise and fragmented frames?
Artist here cannot be the documenter of the individual self of those people who
have been rendered abstract not through the enforcement of state cruelties but
through the very experience of them on the roads, dockyards, airstrips, fences
and so on conveyed through mediatized images. These images in turn become another
experience in itself that helps the artists and the people in general to visualize
them in their given conditions. It is a complex process of experiential
cognition, like a mirrored image of an affliction that could be seen in real if
the viewer turns his or her head towards the other side.
(Painting by Nandi)
The reluctance that we as a survived lot feel collectively
to look at the other side helps us to continue with our conscientious existence
even in the midst of continuing atrocities. True, the uncertainty of the
uncertain masses who have suddenly become intermediary human beings who could
be received or rejected elsewhere cannot be given a concrete expression and if
one does so it can maximum become press photographs that speak directly and
move the viewers to unimaginable pain. Here art does something else; it
mitigates the pain, sublimates the reality, reorganize the living human beings
into acceptable patterns that not only edify one with their ‘social and art
history’ but also entertain as affable art objects.
(Painting by Nandi)
In that sense Nandi cannot do anything other than transform
the human suffering into an affordable visual that could perhaps in the coming
years speak of the sufferings of the human lot in a particular time in history,
without really feeling the pain instead could make others exclaim about the
abilities of a work of art to evoke history and the perils that it contains. This
parade is an abstraction of the other and ironically the other is not the
disenfranchised, dispossessed and disowned human beings but the artistic
feelings for them, which I feel is the responsibility of art because art cannot
do anything to assure a definite destination to these people. Art and artists
can only display their own inability to do anything towards their
rehabilitation. Nandi’s paintings are the parades of our own collective lack of
empathy or sympathy; our own callousness is seen queueing up; these are mirrors
held unto the viewers.
(Painting by Nandi)
Art historically speaking, Nandi’s works evoke the memories
of the early works of N.S.Harsha, who has done multitudes of people engaged in
common activity like eating or sleeping. Through the repetition, the images are
caused to melt and become a feeling, at times a feeling of absurdity. Nandi’s
works, though they do not follow the color scheme or similar patterns that
Harsha had used, still goad the viewers to connect with a contemporary master
artist like N.S.Harsha. That is not a problem at all because what I emphasis
while saying this is art’s inescapable indebtedness to its own past. Nandi subconsciously
pays tribute to that past of our art.
-JohnyML
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