No painter of pretty pictures

If Amitava's early practice was characterised by anger, he has since tempered it with wisdom, yet he remains a chronicler of social wrongs, writes Kishore Singh

Speaking to the artist Amitava (he prefers not to use his surname) a few days ago, I was struck anew by the cerebral rigour that has shaped his practice. Interviewing him for a book some years back, I had discovered his love for philosophy and existentialism on the one hand, and of world cinema on the other. The latter appealed to him for its ability to resonate with audiences around the world, helping him understand that a forced Indianness was not the path he wanted to embrace for the creation of art. This disassociation was as important as understanding politics and society that shaped his thinking. If the Emergency was one such pivot, the falling of the Berlin Wall nearly 15 years later was another benchmark — it was this “confusion and chaos” and man’s instinct to survive despite the nature of his circumstance that led to the creation of some of his most iconic art.

Amitava was lucky to be exposed to international art when young — he was born in 1947 — despite India being “closed” for much of his growing years. As a teenager in New Delhi, he came to the Lalit Kala Akademi to view an exhibition of French artists that included some of Europe’s most prominent modernists. “I would keep coming back, and would look around to see if no one was watching, then I would touch the canvases with my fingers. That was a great sensation — imagine touching the same canvas that Picasso had touched while painting it.” To this rostrum that included Georges Braque and Toulouse-Lautrec he added Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Terry Rosenberg and Roy Lichtenstein when an American exhibition, curated by Clement Greenberg, followed. Friendships with Indian artists blossomed, and a young Amitava found himself less influenced by the Progressives but drawn to the work of such peers as Jeram Patel. 

Amitava’s art was chiefly shaped by world events in the 1970s and ’80s, and a suggestion of darkness imbued it. The fallibility of the body was his rostrum and he questioned the relationship between the body and the mind — between self-doubt and unfulfilled desire. On the other hand, he was also drawn to the minimal landscape of wheat fields, rumbling clouds and the fierce drumming of rain — all this achieved through small, expressive lines. His visual ecology developed as a place of silence even as momentous, cataclysmic events unfolded in the unseen terrain around.

Amitava’s work may appear abstract but its essence is usually isolated, lonely figures, often distorted and dismembered.

Amitava’s work may appear abstract but its essence is usually isolated, lonely figures, often distorted and dismembered, their sharp angularity reflecting social violence, the paint thickly applied with a brush, never a spatula, to create a texture. Eventually, this came to be replaced by an industrial culture and robotic beings that went on to characterise his work even though a globalised, consumerist society seemed to further incarcerate the individual. His methodology included dotting, stippling, doodling and cross-hatching to create a reductive form uniquely his own. 

If his early practice was characterised by anger, Amitava has since tempered it with wisdom, yet he remains a chronicler of social wrongs. His articulation is best exemplified in his work, and his drawings are instances of a powerful tool that he wields like a scalpel. The powerful oratory of his art is yet to be fully acknowledged, but of this there is no doubt — Amitava’s work has the power of truth and the longevity that draws from it. In that sense, his visualising of our current crisis will not paint a pretty picture. “My art is about experiences, both the immediate and the remembered,” Amitava has said. Time alone will make it palatable. 

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated