Auteur Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love is about a great love and a great loss. The couple in the film is a Mr Chow, a journalist with slicked-back hair and sad eyes, and Mrs Chan, a secretary in stylish and fitted cheongsam dresses. The two meet across a passageway in a cramped apartment building in British Hong Kong of the ’60s the day they both happen to move in; they eventually get curious about each other – something that is helped by the constant absence of their respective spouses.
With time, they realise that their partners are having an affair – Mrs Chow with Mr Chan – but by then their own relationship, packed with silences, glances, things said and unsaid, is seen moving, scene by scene, into their little bubble. Till things to fall apart. The couple is cast in red as they come together to work on a script and there’s a capture of the first stirrings of desire; the scenes are awash in green as their feelings develop and they acknowledge it; shades of yellow tinge the scenes of looking back. Young artist Varad Bang was mesmerised by the “painterliness” of these scenes.
Inspired by the film, Bang’s paintings draw on the film, a treat for the eyes, and create the scenes anew in light and shadow, through selected interiors reminiscent of Vermeer—the Dutch painter is also an inspiration—and Wong Kar-wai’s dimly lit Hong Kongscapes, but that could recall an urban setting anywhere where due to lack of time, moments of connection are rare, or fleeting, or cut short. Those paintings are currently hung at Delhi’s Pristine Gallery, in an exhibition titled ‘The Weight of Love’ till May 11.
Starting out
Bang grew up in Aurangabad, and now lives in Pune. He came to art via architecture. He found it to be a discipline that was “too structured”. Art helped soothe him, get him in a zone with “no disturbance”. The idea that he could be a painter grew on him over some time while he tried out different things only to figure that art was his “way of speaking with the world or with the people around me”.
He went on to study art in Florence, where he produced figurative works, and studied the old masters. He also grew to love what was, initially, a struggle. “It was quite tough for me to understand oil painting. In oil painting, you can’t paint in just one layer. You have to put in the work, and spend days and weeks building on the layers. And you’re always into the painting. You can't be out of it,” he says, as if recreating the mood in which the romantic couple stayed in pretty much all through Wong Kar-wai’s film – the mood of tracing and re-tracing a passion, what they imagine to be the paces of their respective partners falling in love with each other.
Or, as Chow put it: “I was only curious to know how it started. Now I know.” It’s a proxy life, but when they stop talking in circles and the time comes to make a break with their failed relationships, Mr Chow and Mrs Can would rather keep their feelings for each other on freeze. Bang’s paintings show the same flush of unspoken desire—in it the woman waits, the couple walk side by side but their hands don’t touch, the man smokes into the night preferring solitude over action.
Re-creating a mood
But why simply recreate frames and characters of such a well-loved film? Bang explains: “I read a book called On Photography by Susan Sontag. She says if you take the stills away from a film, they have a different context. A film unfolds over time while a painting stays in that moment, and when you look at it like that, in an exhibition, where there are lots of paintings by me, they will interrelate with each other. There’s like a collective meaning there. Also, while watching a film, the frame that you're looking at is an editor’s selection and it guides your feelings. But looking at a painting in a gallery, you have the control over which particular scene you want to have more impact on you. So, that sparked off the idea in me to take particular scenes from the film and paint them, so that the viewer can look at it as long as s/he wants and derive whatever meaning s/he wants, and just soak in that feeling."
Bang’s paintings are also geared for short attention spans and quick epiphanies. In his words: “Today, the way we watch movies on OTT platforms, isn’t it an accepted way of watching movies? You can watch one at your convenience, take a break, and come back to it.”
Staging an encounter
The exhibition flow has also been structured to keep today’s audience in mind. The paintings are prompters of feelings, arrangements of encounters in which curiosity is the first overture that is followed by an invitation, and then the beginning of the ending. “The way I've chosen the scenes, and the way the exhibition has been structured, the starting scenes you will find are quite wholesome, warm — they lighten up the mood. Then the scenes get more distant—they have a cooler tone—more emptied out, like the way love fades away over time,” says the artist.
“I tried to blur the lines between the audience and the characters in my work—you'll see lots of scenes where you don't see the faces,” he adds. “The characters are in the middle of a certain moment; or they're physically there but thinking of the other person. And then there are certain paintings where you see the faces, which kind of remind the viewer that you're not them, you're living their world. So, it’s an interplay between all these different states as well. The experience of love and longing, and then the memory of it; love in the present and in the absent.”
Heartbreak is an important feeling, Bang says. It’s a house many people stay in. “We kind of neglect it, put it down. But I have a feeling that it teaches you things, which even love might not,” he says.