Document and evocation
The series of video films and photographic prints presented by Bhavani G S at the Venkatappa Art Gallery (May 26 to 30) revolved around her "Journey with the River Cauvery", the vast theme that has been preoccupying the artist for the past few years.
Bhavani who not so long ago started out as a painter now among other projects does installations which using organic materials in their original surroundings create as though steered as well as rediscovered natural equivalents of paintings and sculptures. The new works bases on and includes the first part of the Cauvery exploration from its source in Coorg and through Karnataka, while extending it further onto the river's course in Tamil Nadu until the delta.
The artist writes about her endeavour as a very personal one during which she wished to find and probe her urban self in the sacred as well as profane landscapes of the Cauvery, pristine as well as industrial, along with their nourishing and destructive aspects. She meant also to relate the generative force and the life flow embodied in the river to the feminine experience. All the elements of the intended meaning could, indeed, be recognised in these art works, although not alwa ys in terms of sufficiently evocative sensations, since there seemed to be an unresolved relationship there between the role, character and potential of documentation and of simple expressiveness or more complex positioning unexpected angles of visually suggested thought.
The pieces are not performance images, because the project, which had the artist progressing with the river photographing the views and accompanied by a camera-person, wished to only capture her empathic presence and sensitive, responsive movement there. Thus, what she saw and how she saw it predominates in the videos and photographs, even if that happens mostly through a quite literal kind of description that infrequently alternates with evocative passages.
The main film keeps shifting from pleasant and atmospheric, if not entirely original, sceneries, to rather pedestrian ritual temple ceremonies, stirring close-ups of the current, vegetation and animals to the artist's figure, to agricultural fields, villagers at work and festival occasions, to cities, highway traffic, dams, bridges, enmeshments of pipes in factories and heaps of trash and sand stretches. Documentation with verbal commentary is not relieved by the mere formalism of the screen divided into four or more simultaneous different vistas.
On occasion, yet, the spectator was moved by the intrinsic, art-like beauty of some details, for instance the holy tank with flowers appearing to be framed as if a painted canvas. Some such moments of aesthetic and intuitive potential became the foci of short individual videos, in particular the circling along with the thousand pillars at Srirangam and the tying of water grass blades at a confluence. The frequent motif of man-made structures reflected in the water and of the artist's shadow there could be appreciated as conductive towards the feel of everything being immersed in the river as another side or ethos of it.
The prints included in the show aimed at a similar effect thanks to single attention on the same or related themes. Again one liked the instances consciously enhanced the striking aesthetic qualities that were already evident in the actual scenes, be it the powerful geometric pattern in a road, the animated stances of serpent stones or the violent wounds in riverside boulders. Although one understands the importance of involving oneself and others in experiencing normal life as art or at least art-like, for that to come through heightened sensation should prevail over statements.
Cosmic pulses
"A Piece of Heaven", the just concluded exhibition of paintings by Tarun Cherian (Alliance Francaise, June 3 to 10), was dedicated to the spiritual joy the artist finds in celebrating his faith in god as manifested in luminous forces and intangible rhythms and transformations that fill immediate as well as cosmic spaces and matter.
The simplicity of his heart perhaps had to be reciprocated by the certain naivety of composing and brushing. Although fortunately not falling into the trap of literally symbolic representation, that is so frequent in such cases and mostly involves figural motifs, his oils on canvas nonetheless reach out for the surety of design.
Anchored in the notion of radiance emerging from one point and spreading centripetally, Cherian's divine rays dominate his imagery which, even when on the face of it abstract, adheres to a rather repetitive gamut of patterns which besides fanning out, evolve flat curtains of short, blurred pulses or similar fields from within stirred into wave trajectories. Not loud, the idiom, relying on white-impregnated yellows and a spattering of slightly shadowy browns, remains pleasantly vague.
Marta Jakimowicz
The series of video films and photographic prints presented by Bhavani G S at the Venkatappa Art Gallery (May 26 to 30) revolved around her "Journey with the River Cauvery", the vast theme that has been preoccupying the artist for the past few years.
Bhavani who not so long ago started out as a painter now among other projects does installations which using organic materials in their original surroundings create as though steered as well as rediscovered natural equivalents of paintings and sculptures. The new works bases on and includes the first part of the Cauvery exploration from its source in Coorg and through Karnataka, while extending it further onto the river's course in Tamil Nadu until the delta.
The artist writes about her endeavour as a very personal one during which she wished to find and probe her urban self in the sacred as well as profane landscapes of the Cauvery, pristine as well as industrial, along with their nourishing and destructive aspects. She meant also to relate the generative force and the life flow embodied in the river to the feminine experience. All the elements of the intended meaning could, indeed, be recognised in these art works, although not alwa ys in terms of sufficiently evocative sensations, since there seemed to be an unresolved relationship there between the role, character and potential of documentation and of simple expressiveness or more complex positioning unexpected angles of visually suggested thought.
The pieces are not performance images, because the project, which had the artist progressing with the river photographing the views and accompanied by a camera-person, wished to only capture her empathic presence and sensitive, responsive movement there. Thus, what she saw and how she saw it predominates in the videos and photographs, even if that happens mostly through a quite literal kind of description that infrequently alternates with evocative passages.
The main film keeps shifting from pleasant and atmospheric, if not entirely original, sceneries, to rather pedestrian ritual temple ceremonies, stirring close-ups of the current, vegetation and animals to the artist's figure, to agricultural fields, villagers at work and festival occasions, to cities, highway traffic, dams, bridges, enmeshments of pipes in factories and heaps of trash and sand stretches. Documentation with verbal commentary is not relieved by the mere formalism of the screen divided into four or more simultaneous different vistas.
On occasion, yet, the spectator was moved by the intrinsic, art-like beauty of some details, for instance the holy tank with flowers appearing to be framed as if a painted canvas. Some such moments of aesthetic and intuitive potential became the foci of short individual videos, in particular the circling along with the thousand pillars at Srirangam and the tying of water grass blades at a confluence. The frequent motif of man-made structures reflected in the water and of the artist's shadow there could be appreciated as conductive towards the feel of everything being immersed in the river as another side or ethos of it.
The prints included in the show aimed at a similar effect thanks to single attention on the same or related themes. Again one liked the instances consciously enhanced the striking aesthetic qualities that were already evident in the actual scenes, be it the powerful geometric pattern in a road, the animated stances of serpent stones or the violent wounds in riverside boulders. Although one understands the importance of involving oneself and others in experiencing normal life as art or at least art-like, for that to come through heightened sensation should prevail over statements.
Cosmic pulses
"A Piece of Heaven", the just concluded exhibition of paintings by Tarun Cherian (Alliance Francaise, June 3 to 10), was dedicated to the spiritual joy the artist finds in celebrating his faith in god as manifested in luminous forces and intangible rhythms and transformations that fill immediate as well as cosmic spaces and matter.
The simplicity of his heart perhaps had to be reciprocated by the certain naivety of composing and brushing. Although fortunately not falling into the trap of literally symbolic representation, that is so frequent in such cases and mostly involves figural motifs, his oils on canvas nonetheless reach out for the surety of design.
Anchored in the notion of radiance emerging from one point and spreading centripetally, Cherian's divine rays dominate his imagery which, even when on the face of it abstract, adheres to a rather repetitive gamut of patterns which besides fanning out, evolve flat curtains of short, blurred pulses or similar fields from within stirred into wave trajectories. Not loud, the idiom, relying on white-impregnated yellows and a spattering of slightly shadowy browns, remains pleasantly vague.
Marta Jakimowicz