Dattatreya Apte’s The Soft Stone, presented by Aakriti Gallery and curated by Nanak Ganguly, is at once a surprise and a visual feast. Known for his sensitive prints—he is, after all, an accomplished printmaker—Apte has been quietly developing his paper-pulp works for years, occasionally showing them in group exhibitions and, consequently, inviting less attention than they deserve. Critics cannot really be faulted for overlooking this considerable body of work in the medium. Even I, an art critic who has known Apte for the last three decades and who shares Delhi as a base with him, was unaware of the existence of this remarkable body of work. The irony is that I had to travel to Kolkata to see it. My request to the gallery is that the exhibition be taken to all the major art centres in India, including Delhi and Mumbai.
Paper pulp, according to me, is a medium in permanent transition. It has left its “paper state” and assumed an intermediary status: it is neither rock-solid nor as brittle as a biscuit. Pulp can be made from anything that can be pulped, including books that run counter to hegemonic ideology. In their experimental fervour, artists often use pulp as a major medium while simultaneously concealing or transforming its “natural” appearance.
Apte began working with the medium like a modernist searching for a new material, a new form and a new vocabulary of images. But someone had already done something that seemed almost insurmountable. That artist was Somnath Hore, whose Wounds series in paper pulp had established an ultimate benchmark through its combination of pathos, poignancy and aesthetic minimalism.
Apte was aware of this when he began working with pulp in the 1980s. One therefore encounters a series of works with embossed images that oscillate between pure abstraction and semi-figuration. They are not wounds or incisions per se, but gestures that a printmaker could make within the possibilities offered by the medium: pressing objects into the surface of the pulp. The progression of Apte’s experiments becomes evident in the exhibited works, where he is seen pressing natural and found objects onto the surface to achieve desired effects.
His increasing felicity with the medium takes Apte to different heights as he moves from accidental discoveries and deliberate impressions towards a more uninhibited play with the material. The existential phase gradually gives way to a pleasurable articulation of larger vistas, offering glimpses of Impressionistic reflection. Apte creates symbolic narratives as well as a vocabulary of narrative symbolism. His works resemble analogue film excised from a spool of positive prints. The film in hand tells a story through frozen action, while allowing us to imagine the sequences that precede and follow it.
A modernist to the core, Apte makes his works speak in many tongues. One work, Deluge, evokes memories of The Sea of Ice (also known as The Wreck of Hope), the historic painting by the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich. A similar sense of sublime Romanticism enters Apte’s works at regular intervals.
The Out of the Box series, meanwhile, presents broken pieces of imitation wooden structures made from paper pulp and mounted on painted canvases. They appear, at first, to be dismantled boxes. Seen from another perspective, however, they become faces of existential human beings whose identities have been pulverised by the competing ideologies that govern society.
Seen together in a solo exhibition—even though the curatorial intention is not to present the works in a linear chronology—Apte’s works begin to make sense in relation to one another. They virtually link their paths, enabling viewers to perceive the individual works within a broader artistic perspective. Apte allows his printmaker’s sensibility to leave its impression on most of the works while, at the same time, allowing each work to develop a personality of its own.
A must-see exhibition for Kolkatans.
JohnyML
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