REVIEW

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Art Gallery being a Playground

“Art as an activity is a conflation of child-like play and adult-like responsibility,” feels John Xaviers while visiting a group show, Hide & Seek at OED Gallery, Kochi. Anpu Varkey, Kajal Shah, Kavita Balakrishnan, Neema Vaghela, Pramodh Kumar, Prasad K P, Ruchin Soni, Roopasri, Sujil S, Sujith K S, Sumesh Kamballur, Umesh Unni and Varun Cursetji are the artists participating in the show.

In the movie Chronicles of Narnia a group of kids play ‘hide and seek’ and the smallest girl hides inside a cupboard and slides into a snowy fantasyland to which the rear of the cupboard opened. She returns and takes all the kids into this fantasyland. The cupboard is a threshold between reality and fantasy, an escape route into a new way of looking at the world, made possible through the act of hiding in the child’s game.

In the show Hide & Seek, on view in Gallery OED, Kochi, the curator Kavita Balakrishnan has included a painting by Varun Cursetji which depicts a wooden piece of furniture that resembles a cupboard with an open door, inviting a small child playing ‘hide & seek’ to hide inside, and maybe to explore another world within, towards the wilderness of a floral world, as the piece of furniture is set against an arabesque design pattern.

Children understand the world through play. Pedagogues insist on the importance of including play as an integral part of educating the small ones. As one attains adulthood, this element of play gradually diminishes in the seriousness of life, which Kavita Balakrishnan describes as “hurriedly graduating into a toy-less state”. But adults resort to game-like situations to let off the steam. What is so refreshing about a Yahoo! Chat, or a Federer vs. Nadal Wimbledon final or an MTV Splitsvilla or a Jaane Tu, ya Jaane Na is that, it is ‘play’, though it may or may not throw some light on life.

There are times in the life of an adult when the child’s games have to be replayed. It is when the adult has to play the role of a parent or a grandparent. The parent desires and possesses toys very much like the child; through the child. The parent plays with the child in games that children play. The curator Kavita Balakrishnan is such a parent of a small child. The curator has expanded and transferred the childlike playfulness embodied in her domesticity onto the fetishistic surfaces of the gallery walls, in that she describes in her curatorial note, “Art object is a potential toy, the marker of…idiosyncratic…artistic subjectivity.”

Art has ‘playfulness’ written all over its face. The artist knows that what is being done is not serious, in that it is not going to make any substantive change in the circumstantial realities like a political legislation does, but at the same time there is an assumed seriousness, as in the ‘hide & seek’ game of a child. It is important here to understand that, though both the child and the artist are ‘playing’ as a way of seeing the world in ways in which it has not been understood before, the artist’s play is conscious, calculated and result-oriented. Art as an activity is a conflation of child-like play and adult-like responsibility.

The artists included in ‘Hide & Seek’ are mostly beginners, very young painters in the budding stages of their artistic career, not weighed down by private gallery assignments, but dabbling with paint like children in search of a pictorial language. Anpu Varkey, Kajal Shah, Kavita Balakrishnan, Neema Vaghela, Pramodh Kumar, Prasad K P, Ruchin Soni, Roopasri, Sujil S, Sujith K S, Sumesh Kamballur, Umesh Unni and Varun Cursetji have been shown with a couple of their paintings.

Kavita Balakrishnan has resorted to the pictorial grammar of political cartoons in a triptych of small canvases, where the repeating imagery is that of the Malayalee politician in characteristic white shirt and white mundu, with outstretched banners as the backdrops.  In one of the frames, a group of politicians have gathered around a hospital bed, on which a man is ailing presumably in a political violence as in Kannur with a backdrop banner which claims “we condemn”. It is not only in wash treatment that Kavita Balakrishnan has assumed a childlike-ness, but in the very sarcastic attitude like that of a illustrative cartoonist, which is nothing less than the openness of a child who saw that the emperor is naked.
 
In choosing the water colors of Prasad K.P, who is a final year B.F.A student of painting in Trissur Govt. Fine Arts College where Kavita Balakrishnan teaches art history, the curator is not only bringing the young painter under her wings, but also is letting the world know of the young boy’s anxieties about the changing landscape of agricultural land in Kerala. One of the images quoted by Prasad is that of JCB earth remover, which is a loaded imagery ever since Chief Minister Achyuthanandan’s revenue land recovery campaign in Munnar, where JCBs were put to use indiscriminately. Are JCBs toys?

Many of the works in the show have white backgrounds, like the clean white papers of a school kid’s notebook on which scribbles have been made out of boredom or curiosity. As if an illustration of this curatorial project, Pramodh Kumar’s painting is a huge white canvas on which horizontal lines and margins are running across as in a ruled notebook with numbers written in childish handwriting on the margin with white paint which is barely visible against white background. What catches the attention of the viewer, as a rupture is an array of colorful toffees across the canvas, at which a cute cat in pink lines straight out of a step-by-step drawing book, curiously looks on. Maybe this picture encapsulates the curatorial idea and it is not surprising that Gallery OED has chosen the image of the cat and toffees, for print and web publicity, as the identity of the show Hide & Seek.

Equally cute is the painting of a puppy by Neema Vaghela, in which the puppy placed right in the centre of the canvas gladly looks out of the canvas. Another painting by Neema in bright red background has a Taj Mahal on top centre, with so many cartoon-like scooters running up and down across the frame, as if straight out of a 2D animated cartoon for kids and there is an embracing couple in a bottom corner. In Neema’s paintings, the objects are closer to the “potential toys”, in form and affects.

In Ruchin Soni’s paintings, whether the artist has intended it or not, the large figures that fill the big canvas space contrasting from the background in almost complementary colors, are reminiscent of the yaksha-gana imageries of the primeval Indian sculptural traditions, with the bare heads, large eyes and fully rounded figuration. For the same association with yaksha-gana, the images exude a carnivalistic joyous playfulness. Moreover, the spot light beams falling longitudinally along the frame, allows a chromatic tonal hide and seek.

Notwithstanding some misfits as inclusions in the curatorial scheme, Hide & Seek is a very refreshing show that prompts us to look at life like a child does, not only to see it differently, but also to ease the anxieties through ‘play’ as an emotional outlet. Moreover the show is self-reflexive of gallery based art practice as it turns a mirror at the playfulness of the artists and the toy-like functions of the art objects.