Circumambulating
Melancholy From inside Out

Venkatesh K. N

Crosstalk is about four artists’ different expressions for a common pursuit; personal yet universal struggle to cope with the contemporary living. Venkatesh K N reviews.

The recent show Crosstalk at Sumukha gallery from 24th may to 21st june showcases the works of young artists who have constructed a ritualistic way to make viewers encounter their collective pursuit. At the origin of the circumambulation is Lokesh B H’s colourful melancholy. A sense of deprivation is narrated, busses and people traveling in these busses have colour but the airplane is just not functional, it does not have a door or window. A cat is hunting for a fish bigger than its mouth. There is no center to most of the compositions instead is a synecdoche; when the center is painted there is also symmetry. Center is only bestowed to hawkers and rural folk close to animals who are increasingly dwindling due to the developing metropolis. The hawking business moving inside the glamorous shopping malls entices a melancholy so colourful. Moving further the most striking quality of Mohan Kumar T’s works is how the sexuality is played with. Here the sex is not represented by the body of the well built muscular men but it is through their activities that their masculine identity is actuated. It is through the body that the past can be experienced in the present within a somatic time enticing a tradition.

The intimacy traditionally shared by human bodies and animals in Lokesh’s paintings has been replaced by bizarre in Mohan Kumar’s works. The next is the large work by Naveen Kumar covering most of the wall. One can begin anywhere in looking at these compilation of drawings and paintings on printed philosophy of art papers. Somewhere in the middle of this work is written ‘No I don’t want to read’, if this is a synecdoche it partially and broadly invokes the modernist stance of Barnett Newman that an artist gets from aesthetics what a bird gets from ornithology-nothing. But at the time of Newman, conservation was not a field as developed as it is now; articulating the rejection of modernist privilege. These invocations become important to understand the art works in the show and particularly as visually suggested by the Lokesh’s work, black cycle. Here the formative years of artist and his struggle to give birth to new ideas in art making is conceptualized. This is before an artist arrives at a stereotyped style.