First brush

Investment manager Arun Rangachari bought 400 works by a reclusive Italian artist.

Arun Rangachari chanced upon the world of art quite by accident around three years ago, but that first brush has grown since then into a significant engagement.

It all began when Rangachari, chairman of DAR Capital Group, an investment management firm with offices in India, Dubai, Malaysia and USA, was invited by his friend Raja Khara to look over the artworks in a house that he had bought in the Biella countryside in Piemonte, Italy. The three-storey mansion had belonged to Pordenone Montanari, a reclusive Italian artist in his 70s.

The story, as recounted later in the international press, goes that Khara, who has an Italian wife and lives in the vicinity, spied a “for sale” sign on the house one day, stopped, went in and found art everywhere, with painted canvases and frescoes on the wall, sculptures in the garden.

He managed to befriend Montanari, and won the artist’s trust. Khara prevailed upon Montanari to sell him some 400 canvases — an investment in which he involved his friend Rangachari.

“We also have the first right of refusal on any subsequent paintings,” says Rangachari.

The tortured world of the artist makes a great story — examples include Vincent van Gogh’s suicide, Francisco Goya’s dark imaginings, Pablo Picasso’s promiscuity — and adds, no doubt, to the mystique of the painter/painting and a few zeros to his price tag.

The Montanari story fit the pattern. Here was an artist who had exhibited only once in his lifetime, in Milan in 1986. The show was so well received that it was a sell-out, but the artist was so turned off by the experience that he shut himself up within the walls of an obscure countryside mansion for 18 long years, not leaving or meeting with anyone, and painting furiously.

No wonder that when Montanari was unveiled to the world in September last year, at a large exhibition at the Italian Culture Centre in London, the media was quick to pronounce him a genius. There was also the endorsement by eminent art critic Edward Lucie-Smith, whom Rangachari had brought in, like any sensible investor, to evaluate Montanari before putting down money.

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The plan, as the DAR Capital website announces, is to float the “Signature DAR Montanart Destiny Fund 1”, a five-year close-ended art fund with a corpus of €6 million (Rs 38.2 crore) invested in 100 selected Montanari works. “It’s a long-term plan,” Rangachari is quick to clarify over the phone from Mumbai.

Rangachari was in India briefly early this month to launch Haunted, India’s first 3D stereoscopic movie directed by Vikram Bhatt. DAR Media, the company producing the film, is a subsidiary of DAR Capital.

Films are a recent interest. “Regional cinema such as Marathi and Bengali are a hugely undervalued sector, with large, discerning audiences,” Rangachari says. DAR Media signed a three-film deal with Mahesh Manjrekar in 2009, of which the first, Lalbaug Parel, released last year to critical acclaim and commercial success. But DAR Media is also getting into mainstream Hindi, with a project tentatively titled Rahul Kaun Hai in the pre-production stages.

“My interest in films goes back to the brief period I worked with my uncle, Bharat Rangachari” — the director of a slew of small-budget films in the 1990s, notably Tere Mere Sapne, the first venture of ABCL, Amitabh Bachchan’s beleagured production company. “He was immensely talented but died young,” says Rangachari. The investor also co-founded digital distribution company UFO Moviez in 2005.

Despite his success in the rarefied world of global investment, Rangachari is a first-generation entrepreneur. His father was a civil servant, which meant his childhood was spent all over — West Bengal, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi — and his mother, a writer. After doing his graduation in economics, Rangachari worked for a while as a journalist with Financial Express, writing for its international supplement. He left for Dubai soon after, working for public relations consulting firm Percept Profile. “That experience helped me build a solid political and social capital,” says Rangachari, who found himself being “sucked into investment consultancy”.

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Over the years, Rangachari has expanded his business to encompass a spectrum of advisory and financial services, having already invested around $250 million in companies in the real estate, media and agriculture sectors. He has shown a keen eye for sunshine industries where the risks might be higher but so are the returns. Take agriculture, where Rangachari is partner in a company that has bought 4,000 acres in Uganda to cultivate the crop that yields stevia, the natural sweetener that has recently been cleared by the USFDA. He is also looking to buy land in Zambia and Tanzania for commercial agriculture.

Art investment, however, is a different ballgame, as Rangachari has discovered. “It’s such a closed economy at one level, so personalities-driven,” he says, confessing that he knew very little about it before Montanari. Now he regularly visits the National Gallery and Tate Modern in London to learn and understand.

Monetising his investment in Montanari will take time, Rangachari knows: “He is someone who has never had a show, much less come up at an auction,” he says. He will have to first build up Montanari’s reputation and aura through a series of exhibitions, books by important names and other similar measures. This show at the Italian Centre, and the handsome catalogue accompanying it, are part of that project. A month-long retrospective opens soon at a museum in Biella in April, followed by a booth in Venice during the 2011 Biennale.

Rangachari is also spreading his risk by acquiring other artists. He is close to signing up with two Indian contemporary artists and is negotiating to tie up with an international gallery to open a branch in India. For now, his Montanari paintings are safe in a vault in Geneva.