Imagine exaltation and ennui, contemporary art born at the crossroads of modernity and antiquity – this personifies the evolution of installation artist Jitish Kallat. From allegory to anagoge, oils and charcoal to pencils and surreal steel zip drawings – Jitish Kallat packs panache into his retrospective at New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art.
Ever since he became a global name in the art world in 1999, Kallat has a life that ripples between cities worldwide. Often drawn to the small details in his environment whose sudden appearance represents evidence of some internal process, this image becomes an apparatus to manifest ideas within a work. Kallat has an epicurean eye. A bulging shirt pocket laden with daily necessities or the dent on the surface of an automobile, or the tiny resilient plant that survives on a dry concrete wall carry emergent meaning and potential. From paintings that are overtly upfront about the national shame of child labour to the associative distortions of malnutrition, illiteracy, paedophilia, his works have been orchestrations of an aesthetic armour.
Called “Here After Here”, this retrospective reflects an artist who uses puns, distortions of caricature to establish a parade of unconnected images symbolically, to combine elements and weave layered metaphors about life.
Jitish Kallat
Multiple affinities and street views
Multiple affinities of Indian culture stream – from film and political posters to contemporary paintings. Between the tart palette , are grainy, low-resolution visual texture references of digital imagery. Mumbai and its urban ugliness and anomalies are his canvas of thought. Everything straddles wider concerns, addressing housing and transportation crises, city planning, caste and communal tensions, and government accountability.
The show oscillates the past and the present and delights in erudition. His ideas spring from street views – and the Mumbai street is his university. He finds themes of life and art – ironies and paradoxes, pain and happiness, anger and kindness, violence and compassion – and everything plays out in full volume. What entices is his sense of scale – and each work a manifestation of meaning and act of creation dictated by retinal or aesthetic considerations.
Sculptural bones
Bones are a recurring riveting theme in Kallat’s work. Annexation 2009 ( painted lead and steel) a seraphic stove and Aquasaurus 2008 (Resin, paint and steel ), a water-tanker – catches your gaze and draw you into their maw. They illustrate Kallat’s love for forensic passion.
Aquasaurus, a seven metre long skeletal sculpture of a water tanker morphs into a prehistoric specimen. Its grinning mouth, menacing teeth and monumental interior void is attractive and repulsive. He comments on the rapid pace of India’s growth and unchecked urban development. It means scarcity of water for millions. While pumps bore deep into the ground tapping ground water, the PWD allows people to buy tanker loads delivered to their doorstep.
Annexation is modelled on the Indian stove. The surface has over a hundred images. These images are found within the porch of the Victoria Terminus building. Quite curiously, the decorative architectural friezes carry several images of animals devouring each other and clinging onto various food stuff. Uncanny how Kallat articulates an ambivalent script of sustenance, survival, co-existence, and emancipation and keeps our interest alive.
Kallat focusses on Mumbai's downtrodden or dispossessed inhabitants, but treats them in a bold, colourful and highly graphic manner in his paintings. He gives us a resounding archive of visual cues in ceaseless mediums and throbbing distortions. He has infinite ease with mediums and creates many worlds.
In giving us a world within a world, Kallat’s subject matter oscillates between decrepit, dirty, old, recycled patched-together fabric of urban India. Within that world are wider concerns, myriad narratives, surreal intensities, complex arrangements of design dictates.
Odd how Kallat doesn’t go back to mythology but shows morbidity that lies behind social change and gives us eternal questions of the discomforting present. He looks unwaveringly at the reality of the metropolis. In 2010 when he showed in London, Kallat used the words of Romanian poet Tristan Tzara: “where we live the flowers of the clocks catch fire and the plumes encircle the brightness in the distant sulphur morning the cows lick the salt lilies....
This mid-career retrospective exemplifies Tzara’s words. Kallat translates transactions with the themes of time. He frames tradition and progress, rebirth and decay along an interplay of scales and proximities, and elicits earthly evocations. At best we are given a matrix of Mumbai through a series of artistic meanderings that are familial and tenuously traumatic but laced with infinite understanding. Metaphoric cross currents and rhythmic polarities bring alive the gentle genius and we glimpse the mappings of a deeply cerebral artist. Curator Catherine David (Deputy Director, Centre Pompidou) plays off the punch of reverberations of textuality in this deeply inchoate retrospective.
('Here After Here' by Jitish Kallat is on till March 14 at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi )
