HYDERABAD: Confluence. It’s not easy to attain the same, that also with dexterity, when it comes to marrying the tradition with modernity. It demands practice of years to lay bare, before the world, the miniature universe of dots and lines constituting to the anatomy of brush strokes.
However divisive may be the argument of figurative being retrograde and abstract superseding it, artists, especially in post war Europe found narrow alleys between the two to create opuses that both juxtaposed and complemented the very notion at the same time.
Even after decades, away from the white man’s world, in Asia, artists have been giving new shapes to what evolved years ago. Seeing artist and art historian Koeli Mukherjee Ghose’s paintings in the solo exhibition titled ‘Gossamer Feat’ at Kalaachakra, Jubilee Hills, one can’t help but find deep-yet-subtle grammar of Bengal tradition blended with strokes of modern techniques.
Her opuses announce their own subtlety through faint shades in ice-pink, powder-blue and mint-green the artist has resuscitated them with. Why I say resuscitate is because the same are tiny ancient doors that lead you slowly inside the artist’s mind much like how the venture inside a city that exists on the line housing the old and the new worlds.
And surprisingly, the doorways offer sunlit spaces to unlock the phenomenology embedded inside the artist’s mind. We see the same translated in her oeuvres.
Her strokes in watercolour and light-proof ink exist in three or four layers on archival paper, which give the paintings a subtle innocent glow though the subjects that she’s has chosen pronounce the callous life and how it finds way inside a sensitive mind. Some of her works ask Sartre’s existential questions while remaining confined in the white spaces the artist has allocated them.
In the artwork ‘The Sound of Silence’ there’s the face of a woman captured sideways, the lines are deliberately kept porous so as to show the outer world seeping inside the layers of consciousness.
The artist moves forward with another ism, and an important ism of all the times - feminism. We see burdens of life passed on to a child-woman by another female, probably her mother or caretaker as the little girl with a glint in her eyes looks up, perhaps to the sky, questioning or maybe in her ignorance meekly accepting the too-heavy burden dumped on her head.
Koeli breaks the epistemology of alphabets by letting ruptured letters of Bengali script find their way inside her paintings, it defines her roots to the land at the same time announcing malleable tenets of her technique. The dark black ink of the words glow like coal shovelled from the belly of a deep mine. Her strokes are intense and smooth bringing results in sync with the subjects she chooses.
It’s interesting to see the artist work with bamboo quills in different sizes with varied nibs. She owns the lines and dots while working with ‘wet on wet’. While painting another canvas in the gallery as the tall trees swayed with the balmy breeze she said, “The title of the exhibition connects all the nine paintings on display here.
I focus on the inside-outside movement of the mind of the subjects.” With her swift hand the perceptions move in tandem bringing together an amalgamation of colours and inky lines that provide a porous field for different isms to arrive on their own.
The exhibition is on till June 4.