Artist Jitish Kallat's search for an interesting space called the ordinary

In this extraordinary time, Kallat tells Pavan Lall about the interesting space called ordinary that he's fiercely in search of

Artists can have affectations of celebrity, assuming larger-than-life persona, with eccentricities often a part of their being. Or sometimes, it’s just who they are. But for progressive artist Jitish Kallat, who belongs to Kerala but who was born and raised in a middle-income family in Mumbai, it’s all about the pursuit of being normal.

“I’m fiercely in search of normality, just the everyday. The ordinary is a very interesting space. A fallen twig, a long walk, a shifting shadow...”

It’s a Thursday morning and Kallat, on the other side of a video call, is at his home in Bandra in Mumbai, sipping a cup of hot water, while I’m in New Delhi nursing a cup of Japanese green tea. The artist doesn’t smoke and hasn’t had a drink for several years, I learn.

Wearing prominently outsized burgundy-framed designer spectacles, which he says he has had for 13 years, Kallat, at 46, looks more like an Apple design executive than artist. He’s wearing a black t-shirt and is punctual to the minute.

Kallat’s upbringing was neither in the midst of industrial wealth nor creativity. His father was a Voltas executive and his mother a homemaker who raised him and his sister. “The growing-up was basic and middle-class, and set in the idea of good education and stable values that most South Indian families hold dear,” he says. The expectation was that he simply came first in class all the time, and Kallat delivered as a good student in his early years at St Francis D’Assisi High School, Borivali.

Once through school, Kallat’s call to become an artist saw no parental objection, but he did learn later that there was some debate amongst his uncles and father. He went to the JJ School of Art and got a degree in fine arts and painting. That’s where he met his future wife, Reena (Saini Kallat).

At 23, his first big exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road Art Gallery put him on the art map and he received a scholarship offer from the British Council but let it pass. “I would not change any­thing in my life story at all when I look back,” Kallat says. “I’ve lectured at univer­sities overseas and I saw kids walking into classrooms with coke cans and burgers… I think I may have enjoyed that a little. But in terms of my artistic trajectory and observation of life, I have learned what I had to by being here in this city.”

That reflects in his work in the last couple of decades, which encompasses photographs, paintings, mixed media installations and sculptures. Kallat has been curator of the Kochi Biennale, a global platform for art, has exhibited widely across the world, and is also represented in galleries in Paris and the US. He’s backed by important curators such as Catherine David and Susan Leask.

Kallat does admit that if there was a concern his parents had, it was that he may go and join an ashram in Pune. “In my teens, I would buy a lot of second-hand books: Osho, Carlos Castaneda, J Krishna­murti. I had every book of Osho’s I could lay my hand on.” He was interested in the bigger questions: “What is my ancestry? What is my body made of? And the elusive existential questions… At the same time, I was interested in sound-and-visual stimu­lation of new cable TV, the music scene, 24x7 news and the emergent internet.”

Kallat’s early works had elements of a playful graffiti pop theme, which seem to have layers under the surface, and they posed deep questions. That, he says, also reflected who he was at the time. “I wanted to have a ‘light’ aesthetic carry a heavy question. When I look back now, I see myself more or less asking the same questions addressing some of the themes that preoccupied me in my 20s.”

The question of time, that of the link between the planet and the wider universe and ourselves, and trying to find geometric correlations in image form and maybe even artistic ritual to bring one to the doorstep of questions. “These are the pointers in my work,” he says.

For the last 100 days, Kallat has been making drawings that he calls integer studies and says that the lockdown has actually helped him generate a stronger sense of structure to his clockwork-like regimen: Rise at 6 am, jog or walk, work at either his Bandra or his outsized Byculla studio and retire by 10 pm.

Unlike some artists who live on social media, Kallat is almost absent from it. He is on Instagram and has some 1,500 followers but has never posted a single story.

His studio — a large 10,000-sq-ft-plus facility in the heart of Mumbai — is the laboratory where he makes large-scale work. “Space is not a constraint and that’s nice. Of course, in the past, I’ve cheerfully made 20-ft paintings in a 10-ft by 10-ft room.”

I’m halfway through my green tea and notice an artwork in the background. It’s called Rain Study, I’m told, and looks like two interstellar orbs on a white back­ground with mathematical calculations. It looks like an astronomical design chart.

Kallat tells me that while making his Rain Study drawings, he would step out­doors while it was raining with the parch­ment covered and in a certain moment allow the rain to fall on the paper. This would leave an imprint that would appear astronomical. “Normally, we artists go looking for ideal light but some of the Rain Studies were made in the dark, at night. The paper wasn’t pinned up before me on a drawing board but held up flat to the sky.”

Does Kallat operate largely on the principle of theories and concepts when it comes to art? Sounding mildly peeved, he says, though with a smile, “There’s typically no theory but a residual understanding that one arrives at little by little. One arrives at these intuitions through the work over time.”

Being married to an artist, is it Kallat vs Kallat on occasions? Kallat says he does bounce ideas off his wife. “And she does say that I ask for an opinion and then don’t take it. To which I say that the power and energy is in the asking,” he says, amid­st mut­ed laughter. “It’s the dialogue with her or some other visitor to the studio that might reset the conversation with a work that has fallen silent.”

If not an artist, what would Kallat have been? “I feel more and more that my life choices help make the art I want to make, and my art is progressively an instrument to direct the course of my life... and my questions about life. I don’t know if I can do that with any other field,” he says, confessing that he is “charmed” by neuroscience and astrophysics.

“The difference between science and art is that science has to be falsifiable; it has to be either true or false,” he says. “But art can be both true and false at the same time. In fact, to get to truth, you may not deploy facts but produce fiction.”

Sounds believable enough.