Contemporary Baroque and the Craft of Painting

A work of art makes a camera out of a human. It makes him move closer, farther away and around it to get a better grasp of the form, theme and technique that have been employed in creating it. Often, one moves through three different distances when there is a large painting on the wall. From far away, he gets an overall feel and narrative (if any) of the work. From the middle distance, he sees the volumes of the images and hints of textures. And from the close or closest ground, he can see the breadth, depth and variety of textures and techniques. This, in fact, changes a figurative/narrative painting into an absolute abstract.

Walking into the LTC Gallery of Bikaner House, where ‘Odyssey’, a solo exhibition of Poonam Bhatnagar, curated by Uma Nair, opened yesterday, in the first hall itself, from the above-mentioned third distance I saw the image of Lord Hanuman giving a head massage to a young girl/boy sitting on the ground. Frantically, I rambled through my knowledge of stories from the epics and found nothing to match the subject of the painting. I walked to the middle ground to take a better look and, lo, I saw that the monkey god, in his avuncular avatar, was not giving a head massage but blessing the young ascetic in the Indian way, by placing both hands on his/her head. I heaved a sigh of relief and apologized to my own self for making a humongous misinterpretation in the beginning.

Yes, art could deceive the viewer with its own craftiness, or the lack of it. Poonam Bhatnagar has a well-developed technique of using acrylic paints in various densities on the canvas in order to create the textural surface that, in turn, becomes the contributing unit of the intended narrative. Bhatnagar has been experimenting with this textured style for almost two decades, exhibiting less and working more, initially using the mehndi dispensing cone as her primary device to employ colour, later to be replaced with direct application from the tubes and other contraptions that she herself has developed for the purpose.

Together, these colours and textures make very visually ‘rich’ paintings, with an assortment of themes such as landscapes, imaginary scenes from the Mauryan period, the theme of enlightenment pivoting on Buddhist lore as symbolic representations, and Hindu mythological stories, besides having a set of sublime landscapes. As I said, they are visually rich and give away an impression of embroidery work done on silk, or perhaps that was my first impression, besides the misadventure with Hanuman ji. To put it in other words, it is a variety of paintings that shows craftswomanship more than painterly qualities. These paintings of Bhatnagar, in this sense, are well-crafted pictorial relief works made on well-primed and well-framed canvases.

Is it a negative judgement? Not at all, but it is a kind of painting where the textural build-up functions as pixels of a digital image. This laborious and time-taking working process needs patience and personal involvement from the artist, which, interestingly, hinders the practice of having studio assistants who could ‘fill in’ the gaps, take further the notations or develop the cues given by the artist. I do not think that Bhatnagar uses an assistant to make her works. Without making any effort to say whether having an assistant is a wrong practice and not having one is something commendable, I proceed to say that Bhatnagar’s works belong to a decorative category of painterly craft, which demands individual involvement, meditation and overall personal evolution.

Let me put this seemingly condescending view into perspective. Painting has, in a way, become a collective, contributory and collaborative process for many artists who use painting as a conceptual practice rather than an individual spiritual creative pursuit. But there are many other artists who are lone wolves of the genre and still hunt alone and howl alone in the moonlit nights of creativity. They do not allow any kind of collaboration or assistance from outside, though at times they use mechanical devices in executing the works. Such singular pursuits have now become a ‘craft’ or a protected practice whose secrets are never imparted through teaching or apprenticeship.

Bhatnagar belongs to this tribe of artists who pursue a lonely path. In the days of technological revolution such as ours, with the time given for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to take over human endeavours, and also at a time when moderation and slow pacing are demanded by the industry leaders who work on the same technology, the art practice of Bhatnagar and her ilk would slowly turn into a ‘craft’ that needs protection and preservation. This will be a dying form of art soon, like ivory carving. When AGI is able to do anything that a human does, art done by an individual artist will become a ‘rare’ product, even negligible in the context of AGI.

I could see Bhatnagar’s works as crafted paintings not just because of the AGI doomers’ attitude but also because she fails, in a way, to choose the right ‘subject’ for her paintings. This may sound a bit confusing because she has chosen, to the best of her understanding, a range of topics that have been the flavour of the time for the last fifteen years or so. She de-historicizes history by making it look beautiful and without any conflict, like a straw painting, but preciously executed with a smattering of gold and silver colours and all the possible colours of precious stones.

Bhatnagar neutralizes the historical conflicts that have existed between Hindu mythologies and Buddhist ideas since ages and flattens them under the general aspect of personal spirituality. That clearly shows that the artist is like a craftsperson without any inclination towards the political or historical understanding of the times in which her art is produced. She repeats the craft of relief painting that she has successfully created for her purpose in subjects that have different historical and political quotients. When that is overlooked, these works become ‘beautiful’ and ‘interesting’ and ‘fabulous’ paintings, which we, the art historians, call contemporary baroque.

One word to the curator. A curator is never a compere or an anchor of an exhibition opening that she curates. She should stick to her brief, as in explaining her curatorial take on the works and a little bit about her personal affinities with the artist in question and her works of art. When a curator like Uma Nair goes into compere mode, the artists who commission curators will think that compering is a part of curating, which obviously is not. Curators should not become comperes and programme anchors. Even if they do, they should limit it to the generic, ‘Welcome to the dignitaries... and when I chose to curate this artist...’

JohnyML