PALIMPSEST - A journey through time

The structure of the field of vision has no firm underlying grid, regulating every aspect of perception. As the eye pans over the visual domain, certain objects register themselves in their totality while others remain on the periphery, hovering as it were in a state of indeterminacy; for the act of viewing is itself selective. Fading in and fading out, focusing on certain elements while paying no heed to others, vision is hardly ever an all encompassing phenomenon. Indistinct images, mutated through memory have a way of entering and altering our manner of seeing the world, as perception is a continuum, a slow settling down of fragmented images, gathering coherence only through the passage of time. A painting if structured through the laws of rendering three dimensional space, has a certain fixity about it. It fails to account for the dynamism of the relationship between the eye and the objects under contemplation. As it is this dynamism that energizes the pictorial surface, abandoning fixed norms of representation gives a work its special edge. While the eye may be the primary tool of perception, the other senses also have a very strategic role to play in achieving a more nuanced understanding of life.

The individual dimension of personal experiences is therefore closely linked to the way a work is structured by the artist as well as received by the viewer, for objects are repositories of individual memories. They hold within them various suggestions and possibilities that intensify our experience of the object itself by generating a constant shift of meanings.

Arunanshu Choudhury whose work one rarely gets to see in Delhi, has lived and worked in Baroda since the early 1990's. Charting an independent path for himself he has sought through his works, to breach the hermetic realm of the visual as ordered by a particular school of thought. His journey from the east coast of India to the west coast, to pursue his interest in the arts at the M.S University in Baroda itself was a choice to seek a language that was different from his inherited cultural environment. Experiencing different cultures as means of transformation has been instrumental to the way his visual language has developed over the years. On viewing his paintings for example, one is immediately struck by the range of art historical quotations that lie embedded within the works. A woman playing a pan pipe, an exquisitely rendered pair of geese reminiscent of Egyptian wall murals, these visual markers from the past appear randomly, determined more by a yearning to create a dynamic relationship between different environments rather than a desire for a fixed context. Arcadian landscapes of quietude, mingle with urban elements in a seamless fashion and through these unlikely juxtapositions, his works seek a negation of the physical world as a singular space, structured through sight alone. A body held aloft in a transparent glass encasement, lost in an act of playing music, inward looking and oblivious to the external world becomes a symbol of the creative act.

It is a body of work that also relies on the vastly different surfaces of canvas and paper to yield very different levels of engagement. Swift fluid strokes, laid out in transparent washes on a rough toothed paper require a very different sensibility from a painting on a canvas which requires a temporal unfolding of ideas over a prolonged period of time. The expanded world of a canvas painting serves a different purpose from the intimate world of a small format water-color. Arunanshu by choosing to paint in both the mediums revels in the very different sensory experiences that they both have to offer. These tactile sensations play a significant role in our perception of the subject matter for the eye relishes each device that adds to the experience of the work.

Functioning as a palimpsest of images, often dream-like in their appearance, the paintings slip and slide between reality, memory and fantasy. Furthermore, the twin devices of superposition and condensation become a way of deepening memory whereby some times certain objects of no significant consequence take on greater meaning than the main subject of representation. Denying the erasure of any experience, he uses his eye, not as a tool to see as a means to know, rather it is used to mediate and reflect on the possibilities of the image as a precipitation of experiences. Achieving a comfortable integration of recollection and flights of imagination, the images then acquire a metaphorical presence.

A rocking chair swaying back and forth despite the absence of the body that once made active use of it, a Cheshire cat hovering in the air, representing the circular passage of time as it appears and disappears, a hand that reaches out to hold on to bubbles that vaporize when subjected to the physical touch, the imagery itself is filled with nebulous symbols that hold the viewer in their grip and encourage a dialogue that seeks answers by a slow unraveling of the surface details to reveal added layers of meaning. Repeat patterns of floral motifs painted with subtle differences or circular configurations which encompass the whole canvas surface, create over all compositions with no single point focus.. What one can discern from this is a discursive strategy that requires a prolonged engagement with the work. A strategy underlined by the relatively low key color palette used in the paintings that ensure that the images are never jarring as the colors are fused together through the juxtaposition of similar light values. This careful orchestration also leads to a deeper engagement with the painting as it lets slip the thematic undercurrents in a slow and steady manner.

- Shukla Sawant