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Review
Ranbir Kaleka
After a gap of ten years, noted artist Ranbir Kaleka recently presented his solo show titled ‘Reading Man’ at the Nature Morte Gallery, New Delhi. JohnyML visits the five paintings and comes up with his ‘reading’ in this review.
Ranbir Kaleka’s latest solo show at Nature Morte, New Delhi, carries a simple but intriguing title, ‘Reading Man’. It appears to be intriguing, thereby layered mainly because Kaleka presents his paintings after a self imposed exile from the world of brush and paint for ten years. He had his solo show last in 1999 at the Art Today Gallery, New Delhi, which had a series of paintings depicting the erotic fantasies and raw energies of an artist who had dived deeply into the chaos of the world around him, perhaps as an effort to keep his cool or as an effort to forget all what had been. For the last ten years, Kaleka was doing experimental videos probing into the issues of image, image making and their registering in real and virtual time.
Obviously, Kaleka must have been ‘reading’ all these years. Here, the act of reading comes to me as a medium of remembering, refreshing the brain and alerting it against the individual urge to forget. All what had been deliberately pushed back to the attics of oblivion where history itself collects cobwebs due to negligence and reluctance to revisit comes back forcefully in these paintings, questioning the individual’s escapist self positioning within the devastating storms of history. Reading, then in this context should be ‘read’ out not as the pleasure of knowledge collection but as a vivisectionist’s dispassionate enquiry to find out the ‘reasons’.
There are five paintings in this show with consciously simplified titles: Reading Man, Man with a Beard, Man with a Torch, Story Teller and the Butterfly Painting. ‘Reading Man’ is less of a painting and more of a theatrical installation. Frozen sculptural images of a wall clock, a mutilated overcoat handing from a peg, a bowl of nothingness waiting to be consumed, three panels with landscapes, wood-scapes and a painted iconic nude man leaning out from a pole, and three wire mesh sculptures of men in three different postures of reading (sitting, standing and reclining) constitute the installation, Reading Man.
What do they read, perhaps is an irrelevant question. For me, why they read is important. The sculptural figures set against a landscape, which has all the potentials of being (and becoming too) a backdrop for a straight narrative, with a suggestion of Manet’s ‘Luncheon at Grass’ (or Holbein’s Philosopher), refute a categorized and simplified ‘present’ and are seen engaged in a curious pursuit of reading. It is a kind of narcissistic act, one could say. However, reading it along with the other works, the viewer would come to know that this pursuit is all about understanding the ruthlessness of a time that had once consumed the artist (or the artist had consumed it) with its lure of terror.
‘Man with Beard’ further explains the artistic positioning vis-à-vis the notion of reading as this painting shows an old man with a number of warts on his forehead, about to shear off his beard. The emotionless (or is it a suppressed anger and pangs?) eyes stare at the viewer who is replicated on the mirror panels flanking the painting. Here, we have a multiple confrontation with the self and the ‘other’. May be I do not want to posit it directly to the 1984 pogrom in Delhi, where the Sikhs were hunted down by a group of political (and social) vandals. It was when many of the Sikhs were forced to cut off their religious attributes like beard and hair. I would rather posit this particular moment of ambiguity into the realm of ‘other-ing’ within the historical process. This man with a pair of scissors in his hand is actually ‘reading’ his ‘other’ in a state of confusion, to be or not to be.
Telling is a counterpoint of reading. In ‘Story Teller’, we see a horizontal painting flanked by window panel like extensions. An iconic nude figure (sort of Lemuel Gulliver) is seen sitting behind a dilapidated machine, which is dwarfed by the gigantic nature of the man. He has three cranes for audience. In the background we see a number of people, reminding us of Millet’s ‘Angels’ shrouded by brown dust. Perhaps, in this painting, the artist envisions a point where the history comes to a full circle (provided we consider the process of history as cyclical or circular). After undoing himself, the man is left with his story of defeats rather than conquests, with a ruined machine for his trophy.
Kaleka, who generally avoids autobiographical references in his works, however iconizes himself in the painting ‘Man with a Torch’. Standing knee deep in a spring, this man seems to have been searching for something. We confront him in a moment of his ultimate frustration. His search has, in a way, become futile, despite his efforts to ‘read’ his surroundings with the help of a torch. The world of confinement (may be reversed protection) that he had left behind stands tall just a few yards away from him, with its protective fences. His finding (or no-finding) is a state of terror and the abject that it engenders.
The crescendo of dark readings, a kind of climatic experience where history’s dark forces are once again conjured up for trial and judgment, finds a resolution, as any artistic vision cannot go without citing the shimmering lights of hope at the horizon (a survival tactics of any romantic during the times of re-visits) and here Kaleka too presents one in the form of ‘Butterfly Painting.’ With a fair amount of magical realism, Kaleka conjures up the birth of a man, a la Botticelli’s ‘Birth of Venus’. He is full of butterflies, as in the last dream of Akira Kurosowa. With Poseidon rising from the chaotic seas in the form of a horse, we see this man standing optimistically in a world which is infested with the advancing armored vehicles and mighty twin towers (collapsible and complete with the radar of acuity). What makes this painting interesting is the faint suggestion of on the notion of image and its reflection on the lower right, reminding the viewer of Kaleka’s celebrated video ‘Man with a Cockerel’.
‘Reading Man’ is an interesting show without gimmicks, the ones that accompany solo show these days. For a trained eye, this show provides insights into history (of the tormented local and celebrated global) and its inevitable nature of posing problems however we try to push it behind. To understand Kaleka’s new works, one has to ‘read’ his works carefully.
