Works of art are often objects onto which we can project ourselves. A starting point is provided by the artist: a feeling, a moment, a colour or a character. It is an invitation, a temporary guideline after which there is no controlling where we allow our minds to travel, what universe we create in conversation with the artist. We come to look at each work brimming with our own experiences and, perhaps more importantly, our own fantasies. We may begin to unravel something we haven’t understood for a long time, or stand lost in new reveries.
Enveloped in silence
Entering Life in the Deep , an exhibition that brings together paintings and drawings by K. Chakravartty and K. Ramanujam, one is initially confused as to why Chakravartty’s bright abstract canvases alluding to the animal world would be juxtaposed with the dexterously controlled black ink of Ramanujam’s ecstatic fantasies. They gesture at two different universes.
Walking close to Ramanujam’s frames to feel his unique characters and creatures coming to life, and standing far from Chakravartty’s to be immersed in the oceanic energy pulsating through the broad splashes of colour or delicate washes of black, it seems as if the meeting points exist in the lives of these two artists.
Chakravartty and Ramanujam were contemporaries: both born in the early forties and both tragically passing away in the mid-'70s — Chakravartty in a car accident at the age of 29, and Ramanujam by choosing to cross over to ‘the other side’ at the age of 33.
Both were enveloped in silence. For Chakravartty, the silence was literal because he was deaf, and for Ramanujam the silence was in his contact with the outside world, his relationship to it as someone suffering from mental sickness, stuttering speech and stunted growth. Desperate to be loved yet unsuccessful in finding a partner, his daily conversations were with the goddesses and creatures that visited him in his dreams that he then brought to life in his elaborate floating temples.
Ramanujam rarely left the spaces in which he studied and worked, first going to art school in Madras and then living in the legendary artist commune in Cholamandalam where he finally took his own life (or in the mythic version, merged into his last painting where he had drawn a dog’s body attached to his own head). Chakravartty, on the other hand, studied art first in Kolkata and then in Baroda, going on to win a prestigious scholarship to France, where he lived for two years. He was conversant in French and exposed to modern art from every part of the world. He then went to Tanzania on the advice of the renowned sculptor and curator Pradosh Das Gupta (his mentor from a young age) to deepen his understanding of wildlife.
The final years
All the works on display are drawn from the early 1970s, the final years of both artists. For Chakravartty, this was the period after he became enamoured with Chinese and Japanese art. This influence is evident — most of the canvases are unframed and rolled out like scrolls against the wall. In his signature, Bengali characters are placed one on top of the other to spell out his name as if they were characters in Mandarin. Particularly in the black and white paintings, in which the ink concentrates itself into pools of dark black before spreading with a floating softness to form delicate branching edges, we find a clear reminiscence of old Chinese ink techniques where the purpose was to capture the rhythm of nature rather than a realistic impression of it.
Chakravartty allows us to feel as if we are lying at the bottom of the ocean looking up at the belly of the beasts wading gently above us through the entangled weedy depths of the ocean floor. While this kind of abstraction may look common to the eye today, it is the combination of a new subject matter — Chakravartty’s sensitive eye and focus on birds and beasts was uncommon in his time — with an old technique, used in a bold manner 40 years ago that we can admire.
Ramanujam’s most touching work in the exhibition shows him in his signature European hat and moustache (he appeared in most of his paintings in this garb), gazing at a visiting apsara or goddess or feminine creature (they are open to interpretation because Ramanujam never tied himself to a particular mythology or story, it was all purely imaginative). He lies raised up in the palm of a hand sheltered by thin creepers. She rides a lion–like beast, with a snake’s head and reptilian fin on its brow, in the sky above him while he gazes helplessly in the cup of arched fingers. The fraying edge of the paper and the sparse use of lines and figures in this work — compared to his other works, many of which are densely packed and scratched over with lines to create a watery haze that we must penetrate — reveals a vulnerability, a “naïveté” (a term used by Gulam Mohammed Sheikh in his writing on Ramanujam), which is often hidden in the hustle–bustle, scale and intricacy of his other drawings.
A common thread
It is this naïveté, an innocence and freedom from political or social, ideological or commercial interests, which signals the common thread between Ramanujam and Chakravartty, rather than an immediately visible visual confluence. Both had a commitment to their personal visions and obsessions. On the occasion of a posthumous exhibition of Chakravartty’s work in 1975, Das Gupta wrote“…being in the proximity of the modern movements in arts, [he] was able to keep himself steady without being influenced by any of them. This shows a remarkable trait of his integrity of character.”
One of the key bridges in finding the echo of each artist in the other is A Gathering at the Carnival Shop , a part–documentary–part–fiction film playing in a loop in the centre of the exhibition. Directed by video artist Moshu, it is a resurrection of Ramanujam, a reading into his work and the telling of the story around his death. Foregoing any kind of rigid art historical or memoir–like approach, Moshu focuses on the paintings themselves, the beautiful wilderness aroundCholamandalam — whose landscape and motifs are apparent in Ramanujam’s work — and, most importantly, the flights of imagination that are possible when immersed in Ramanujam’s iconography.
Artistic vocabularies
The opening scenes of the film: a cacophony of birds, a quote by Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher Bruno Schulz, “Our creatures will not be heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be short, concise: their characters — without a background, sometimes, for one gesture, for one word alone, we shall make the effort to bring them to life. Such is our whim, and the world will be run according to our pleasure,” followed by the ocean roaring, roaring behind a thicket of crisscrossed trees.
Here we are provided with a vocabulary with which to leap into the works on display (you suddenly see the birds fluttering across the drawings, think of the characters from nowhere that Ramanujam consistently brought to life as you look again). Unwittingly, though the film is on Ramanujam, it links us to Chakravartty as well. The metaphor of the ocean reappears throughout the film and the accompanying sounds provide an aural backdrop, a strangely suitable soundscape for Octopus and Catfish , Ecstasy and Fantasy (the titles of Chakravartty’s works).
Slowly, very slowly, one can begin to hear the dead speaking in this quiet well–lit room. Are they talking to each other? There is nothing on the record that shows they ever met while they were alive, these two intrepid artists who were lost to us so early. As we listen in on this conversation, we find a poignant reminder of how many artists we have forgotten, or cannot access. We find courage, a whispering murmur from the walls that says: trust, trust in the power of your imagination.
The author is a freelance writer
Life in the Deep: K. Ramanujam and Kaushik Chakravartty,on at Jhaveri Contemporary, Walkeshwar, till October 22.
