The laugh's (still) on you

Ved Gupta’s painted fibre-glass sculptures show a mirror to the meanies of the world — and they include you, and me.

In Ved Gupta’s droll world, there is no room for humour as he slices through society’s apparent ills with a rapier knife. Slight and intense himself, he parodies the smug venality of the upper classes — “the bourgeoisie” he pantomimes, while lamenting that his own success as an artist is making him part of the bourgeoisie too.

These are politicians and bureaucrats and, yes, if you will, capitalists too, those who will buy his work perhaps, but whom he lampoons using every known cliché in his vocabulary.

But he does it with a child’s wonder at being able to lash out at least fitfully at the bully, caricaturing India’s exploitative classes with the joy of the underdog carrying away the winnings of the day.

But to see Gupta’s work as a celebration is to be fooled, for his social demons are malevolent forces, the equivalent of the mythological dwarves who, behind their smiling faces, are at work seducing “the common man” into bonded labour, into slavery. “Are we,” he asks hypothetically, “really free?”

Gupta’s escalation to the ranks of upcoming artists has been rapid but is hardly unusual at a time when even a scribble is a case for frenzied bidding.

The 33-year-old from Bihar was at a loose end when he failed to qualify for that ultimate wet dream — an education in technology. He didn’t want to be part of his father’s modest business. Even so, the surprise was that he was allowed to go where he wanted, to do what he wanted.

In New Delhi’s Daryaganj, he found work as a labourer; in Pilani, in Rajasthan, he worked with a master sculptor; when commissions started coming his way, he was determined to do his masters in fine art from Baroda; having gained scholarships, he rejected offers from galleries; instead, he spent time musing between “communication in art” and the “commodification of art”.

Seeing the exhibition through his eyes is educational: there is his denunciation of the oppressor, while the oppressed elite (yes, sort that one out) are charmed by their tormentors so they have no escape from the split- but glib-tongued. It is this you see in his canvases too, being exhibited for the first time in his first solo show for Gallery Threshold in New Delhi soon after his triumph at the Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair.

In the paintings, the dog is a symbol both of debasement as well as loyalty; the canine, Gupta reminds you, “is tutored to respond in a certain way by its owner”. Like the painted fibre-glass dwarves that subsume his sculpture and installations, his paintings have dalmatian spots as a leit motif. “I want my own identity,” he stresses.

The moot question is: does this creative identity, no matter how distinct, have longevity? The caricature is hardly novel — Chintan Upadhyay can claim its painted apogee, and Alex Kersey has a Mohawk-like take on it — but Gupta isn’t worried: “I don’t know how my sculptures will look tomorrow,” he reasons, “will I clothe the common man, put him in a suit, change the way he looks…” he meanders off.

But a change is evident, the deliberate figurative being cannibalised by the abstract landscape of cities as they metamorphose into an artwork of scaffoldings. Behind (or under) it is his common man being leached of all dignity. As our cities grow organically, it remains to be seen how Gupta will react: as part of the new landscape, or in anti-thesis opposition to it.