At India Art Summit 2011 Dubai based 1x1 Gallery presents works by Biju Joze, Bose Krishnamachari, Chittrovanu Mazumdar and Shibu Natesan
The multilayered relationship between man and object in the real world is one of the central focuses of Biju Joze’s art. He subjects the original form of an object to several manipulations, playing with scale, function and context. The subsequent narrations are the result of a process of fragmentation and reconstruction, through concept and material. The thumb-print works are made by the meticulous and repetitive process of dabbing the thumb in an ink-pad, and creating impressions on a surface with varying pressures. Isolated, the prints appear as cell like forms, translucent and unsubstantial. Collectively, they ‘become’ the mass of the object.
Bose Krishnamachari’s oeuvre is experimental and constantly evolving. In his drawings of individual portraits, we see a face that appears beneath the unyielding grid of realism. In his “Stretched Bodies” series, the absence of the body resound through the blocks, waves and swashes of neon color, disintegrating the boundaries between what is natural and what is man made. The bodies and ghosts he refers to are not just traces of the physical, but engage in a kind of historical record as well.
In Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s work he image/body breaks up into a collection of signs, delving into the minutiae of detail rather than a coherent whole. The pictures are made up of photo-memories, of visual impressions left in Mazumdar’s mind. His paintings are richly textured, while his photographs show the permeation of dark into light. The artist uses these hues of grey and segues into darkness to reveal the generative quality of black and the ways it can reveal rather than conceal. This line of questioning allows Mazumdar to consider varied historical references in his artistic practice.
Shibu Natesan’s paintings, with their affirmation of realistic representation, mirror the complexity and ambivalence of art practice in India today. Each work, vastly different in subject matter from the other, portrays a person, a situation, a building and interior or exterior scenes. Connecting them all is an acute distillation of the given moment, of a deeply haunting sense of stilled time, of an intimation of some dark, imminent crisis.
