In 1991, after the first Gulf War broke out, the multi-talented artist Vivan Sundaram created 40 paintings with burnt motor oil, crude oil and charcoal using his fingers rather than brushes. The result was a dark web of emotions, which teemed with metaphors of conflict. Now, another artist, Simran KS Lamba, displayed a series using an unthinkable medium— tar—in his works exhibited at Tar–Art: An Anagram of My Life. This black, sticky, thick liquid obtained from coal is generally used in road construction. “It’s a difficult medium. You have to know the right temperature that turns non-pliant tar into a malleable material,” reveals the 34-year-old, who held his first show of tar paintings in 2010, titled Genesis. It was sheer chance that opened up the possibilities of tar.
“I was visiting home in 2006 after an unhappy job stint with a filmmaking company in Mumbai. It was a low phase in my life. One day while overseeing the waterproofing of my terrace, I studied workers heating up the industrial agent and laying it on sheets of plastic, creating fascinating designs by accident. I was inspired to work with it,” says the self-taught artist, who holds a patent for his unique method of creating artworks, recognised by the Government of India this year.
It’s as if Lamba is consciously constantly challenging and pushing himself to think of the next difficult medium. Strings, dry pastel, encaustic wax, even copper, corrugated sheets, and nuts and bolts have found their way to his canvas.
“I don’t stick to one defined path. I want to go beyond it all and explore newer dimensions. It is the metaphysical that calls out to me,” says Lamba, pointing to the painting, Gandhi and Industry. It shows the Mahatma’s charkha at the centre of the copper canvas; it almost looks like a hologram.
The painting with the spinning wheel and lines denoting factories, created on canvas with metal nuts and washers, was chosen for the 61st National Exhibition of Art in 2020. Another striking work is Forest Embers, which imposes construction gravel and wax with tar on its surface. It captures a fractured landscape. The bottom half of the composition is a dark world, where sunlight cannot pass through. The top half, in contrast, emanates hope with its rendering of light.
“That was the intention,” he agrees. “The layered treatment seeks to create the effect of a mirage at play in the work.” While most of the works have ochre as the prominent colour—“because tar, when it dries up also stains the area around it, giving it the yellowing effect”— there are a few works that burst with yellow and blue. Swimming into Light “represents a certain clarity in thought,” says the artist, who wants to write fiction; he majored in English literature.
“It was made in a lighter vein. While there is tar, its use here is almost minimalistic, with splotches of yellow and blue sprinkled across the canvas,” says Lamba.
The exhibition, comprising 56 works, took almost five years to develop, during which time Lamba, a self-confessed introvert, completely shut out the world.
“I hardly stepped out of my studio. The way I work is quite different from other artists, since tar demands immediacy. So I end up working on four or five works at the same time. I make a sketch before I begin, but ultimately the final result may be far removed from what I have imagined,” says the artist, who allows each painting to take its own course and realise its vision.
So, while in some works Lamba starts by applying colour on the canvas before tarring it, he uses the industrial material first, and then fills in the various shades in others. The recent exhibition also shows his evolution as an artist.
When Lamba started out, maybe because tar is almost a non-responsive material, his paintings had thicker strokes, where the deposits were more prominent. With his recent body of works, he has managed to overcome the barriers, which the material initially imposed.
He now seamlessly merges it with a variety of materials. For example, he has used shards of toughened glass he picked off the street for Counting Breath Amidst Lunar Cycles, It’s as if the artist is trying to prove a point that anything and everything can be art, if only you have the eye and patience. It is a point being made to himself, and the world.