Astaguru’s Manifest running 24th to 26th is a melange of Indian contemporary younger and older masters who have shaped the graph of art history over the past, post— Independence decades with their vivacity and their love for tracing Indian traditions within the ambient of contemporary character.

KG Subramanyan’s Janmashtami 2015

One must begin with the Birth Centenary celebrant KG Subramanyan whose work Janmashtami is a beauty to behold.Artist, activist, provocateur, and pedagogue his work is a kinetic synapse of time and tide.This diptych of 2015, a year before his death ,  gives us Lord Krishna as a flautist as well as an individual.The manner in which he divides his canvasses into vertical proportions of a dramatic plethora is what entices and enchants. Janmashtami is more than a mere festival .It is a tapestry of human forms deeply related Subramanyan’s visual language.Lord Krishna here is human, a contemporary character who exists in the comfort of modernist moorings.

Art historian R. Siva Kumar, his closest friend who has followed Subramanyan’s oeuvre over many decades, has in an early interview said that  his images sprang from his mind, “each built from a flurry of gestural marks, each enlivened by a spark of animation and together buzzing like a hive.”

In this historic work we see that Subramanyan plays with the felicity of supple and strong lines , they either  flow or remain  staccato, sometimes smooth sometimes cross-hatched, but he has always had a natural flair for  defining the male as well as female bodies in fluent renderings of expressionist idioms.

Between the frenzied lines and splotches of pale colours, there is Subramanyan’s wry way of seeing deities and humans. We see  tenderness in the flautist. His ability to capture  gentle emotions has an  appeal that is instantaneous.

Vaikuntam’s Untitled Shiva and Parvati 2017

Amongst 4 Thota Vaikuntam works in the sale, in terms of Indian literary history , his Untitled Shiva and Parvati is a work of meticulous and magnificent dimensions.Vaikuntam creates Shiva in his cosmic Tandava posture and grandeur while Parvati nestles next to him as if part of this celestial dance in her own feminine fervour.Their divine connection is seen in the rhythm of the universe. Their dance is accompanied by an orchestra of musicians and singers and amongst them is the little Ganesha with a percussion instrument of a small drum. The choreography of characters is what sustains and delights the viewer.

Vaikuntam’s penchant for strong colours and his strokes of definitive distinction all come into play.The traditional attire of dhotis, the long kurtas and the bright saris all become a testament to our cultural Indianesque fabric.

Feminine Flautist 

Vaikuntam’s second image is a smaller square image of a feminine flautist , within the gentle aura of the rasa of the raaga on the flute Vaikuntam gives art lovers  a framework to understand the contours of the idea of India. While he articulates Indian clothes and jewellery in his own  visual language ,it is the parrot on her left shoulder that  provides a graphic and pictorial reading of a nation that went through the excesses of both colonial and post-colonial regimes but still has a transitional core of values.The green  parrot is the teller of the tales of yore.

Sculpture painted resin

Vaikuntam’s large resin  fiberglass automotive  painted sculpture is a direct translation of his portraits of women on his well loved canvases. Wide kohl lined eyes stare back at us with a poignant feminine  energy of a theatrical persona who possesses us with a peculiar but deeply penetrative presence from the space she inhabits. One need not fully understand who she is but it is her mercurial beauty and her impeccable features and decorative symbolism that invites us into her language of everyday idioms. With this large sculpture art lovers of Vaikuntam’s world  are allowed into the artist’s realms to have an experience of looking at a matriarch from a Telangana community.

This sculpture takes us to a place where the inexhaustible power of life need not be questioned but accepted; with its many  frailties and conflicts, love and sorrow and sadness , falseness and truths, all in the  place of human history .

Vaikuntam manifests a world within and without , and in that space, he moves between the real and the imaginary. He follows his mentor KG Sumbramanyan’s dictum that if you cannot tell the truth with your art, then there is no point doing it. In an interview to me at Saffronart Delhi  two years ago he said:

“ Subramanyan told indelible truths and he was prolific. At M.S.University Baroda  he said art is about celebrating life, about channelling every craft towards multiple expressions, which he termed his ‘ polymorphic vision’ of the world.”

Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi’s sculpture 

The second sculpted wonder is that of Phaneendra Nath Chaturvedi who has for the past 5 years created an ensemble of enchanting sculptures and canvasses with butterflies.In this canvas on board we see a juxtaposition of a stainless steel butterfly along with a surreal painting  that he calls The Siblings – 3. The permutations and combinations of the large wings and the small both create a corollary of conversations for us.

Stepping into the chamber of this emerging master’s  art, our senses are at once serenaded  by the heady mix of soft steel and the resonant colours and shapes that at once shift and sieve in terms of the metaphors of fragility and mortality.

One can analyse and theorise where these shapes come from in zoological fantasies and observation of the Monarch butterfly,  when you know that Phaneendra is a voracious reader and has deep engagement in ancient Indian literature.

The miniature sculpted wonder with wings presents to art lovers a unique path to contemporary art practice in India.It is as if Phaneendra has  dug up Indian history  to examine her art , through word and practice, mastering truly by first-hand experience, and working with his hands to perfect the material and process it in modern technological dimensions that mix science and nature so that  his creation is both unique as well as original in his  own expression, unfettered from all cravings and explanations, by generating a clear context to a universal culture and dynamic of loving and admiring insectivores all over the globe.

Yashika’s tableau of Prakriti 

Amongst emerging young masters is Delhi dweller Yashika Sugandh who creates a diptych titled Barkat.Yashika takes the subject of intertwining  branches of trees to create a tableau in which she adds elements of nature’s bounty. When you look at the miniature forms you know she uses a magnifying telescopic head gear  to create these fine elements that add to the ecological echoes of botanical bravura.In many ways she brings miniature traditions forward to contemporary leanings.

Indeed we can imagine here , an artist who has since childhood created her own fantasia perhaps, a prescience of her own  immediate worlds. The energy of her creatures and the tensile tactility of her finesse , possess  within  a Dawinian  presence from the spaces they inhabit. One need not fully understand; but we are allowed into the artist’s world to have an experience that remains unforgettable.

IMAGES:ASTAGURU

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