OF THE UNSEEN AND METAPHORIC
PARAMJOT WALIA
Using numerous metaphors of the subliminal kinds, three renowned artists bring to the fore a unique show titled, ‘Cat Walk, Blue Moon’ at the Sanchit Art Gallery, New Delhi. The show focuses on the beauty and relevance of artistic metaphors employed in rendition of the art works forming a deep, rich visual language, reviews Paramjot Walia.
The show titled ‘Cat Walk, Blue Moon’ at Sanchit Art Gallery uses both ‘blue moon’ and ‘cat walk’ as metaphors playing on the artists and a viewer’s perspective. Curated by Kolkata-based art expert and historian Arun Ghose, the show displays artworks by Thota Vaikuntam, Arpana Caur and Neeraj Goswami. Elaborating the concept behind the exhibition Arun says“Artists’ obsessive association with their skill of representation is the binding factor that threads them together, to a large extent. This selection of works aim to reveal this preoccupation of artistic skill and its use in developing a
visual language full of communicable ideals without sacrificing its artistic positioning in post-modern pan-Indianness. It is almost like a nocturnal cat-walk around the acheiropoieta of accumulated visions.” Women in bright strokes of colors with vermilion bindis, draped in colorful sarees in Thota Vaikuntam’s works celebrate the sensuality of the voluptuous village women. The love for women in his paintings can be traced back to the impersonation of women characters by the male artists of the theatre groups performing in his village. Thota’s works showcase ‘figurative symbolism’ with the masked appearances acting as metaphors either celebrating, nuancing, or critically elaborating the men-women relationships.
The true protagonist of his paintings is its ‘illusionism’; the contradiction which it sets between the illusion of reality and its pictorial physicality. Whether Arpana Caur’s ‘All is fair in love and war’ depicting a yogini peacefully balancing herself amidst atrocities in this world or ‘Day and Night’ series joining the sensory experience to metaphysical truths, both give the viewer a direct contact with eternal verities. Her work attempts to encompass the physical and spiritual worlds that represent the realities peculiar to time or sphere. In her ‘Day and Night’ series Arpana captures the shift in time by drawing a woman in yellow embroidering and a woman in black cutting a thread. She has used scissors as a representation of time to denote how fate cuts the thread of life when death comes to play. She combines abstract art with the human form giving it a touch of both ‘human symbolism’ and ‘lyrical abstraction’. Power in Neeraj Goswami’s works lies in their capacity to turn the transitory into the eternal (shunya). The expressions and the sensual movements that appear in each piece, create mystical allegories about the universe. By combining his interest in the geometric form with his desire for symbolic content, he has engendered a language that explains the human condition through a unique perspective. Contemplation behind each geometrical form gives his abstract work a definable propositional content. His art speaks of the central idea of mysticism, that is, the connection of the soul or the self to reality/God.
