Can you live in a painting? Can a two-dimensional work be immersive? Contemporary artist Manish Pushkale’s Carte Blanche allows for this experience. Currently showing at the Guimet Museum in Paris, France, the 150-sqft cocoon-like installation is a response to the disappearance of the Great Andamanese indigenous people through natural disasters, tourism and globalisation.
The canvas walls are painted on both sides inviting the viewer to step inside and engage with the mysterious and forgotten sanctuary. It’s an abstract representation of the Bo tribe’s now-extinct ‘language of birds’ (Aka-Bo)—a lingual bridge between homo sapiens and passeridae (family of small birds).
The work is composed of Japanese Shoji and Fusuma patterns to create a non-concrete architectural experience. Pushkale says, “It comprises 60 canvas panels with a variety of organic and inorganic material such as basalt stone and ochre, covered in mineral pigments from rocks taken from different geological layers in the Andamans. One side of the work gives an experience of the galaxy or the sky of edicts from redundant languages; the other side provokes the memory of the horizon of earth with its geological and geographical patterns.” The artist desires to create an experience while walking in its labyrinth. While viewing the work, there comes a moment when the audience reaches the end of one side; it is then that the sky and the earth gradually change their position. “For me, it represents the tragedy of the loss of the horizon and also humans for which this bird is waiting to converse with,” he adds.
For Pushkale, the kernels of the work lie in the dark moods of the first lockdown in 2020. “While physically and mentally confined,I was reminded of a lecture by linguist Ganesh Devy, which I had attended in 2019,” reminisces the artist. Devy had narrated the story of Aka-Bo, sustained from centuries. The language went extinct in 2010, with the passing of the last known speaker. Pushkale’s interest in languages made him imagine the script. “Our cultural heritage is of extreme significance. It carries the imprints of our collective memory and the ancient knowledge, wisdom and civility—all of which have been displaced by our modern individual intelligence,” he says.
It is for the first time that the self-taught artist—who has a repertoire of non-referential abstractions—has ventured into something that is idea-centric. This is also his largest artwork so far. “It all happened simply because of the nature of this project, which provides the white or blank card to an artist to create something out of one’s established practice,” he adds. The space where this exhibition is housed is not a regular straight-line flat-wall white-cube gallery. It is a rotunda, which automatically provokes the artist
to think about display with a difference. Pushkale is in august company. The show is running alongside the retrospective of Mark Rothko at the Louis Vuitton Foundation and a major exhibit of drawings by Picasso at the Pompidou Centre.
Manish Pushkale’s Carte Blanche is on view till March 4, 2024, at the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques, Guimet