Indian art: Meet the masters of popular aesthetics

These artists form the bulwark of the market and include well-known names with a consistent body and quality of work. To the public, they represent the face of Indian art without having to carry the b

Jul 02, 2016, 02:45 IST5 min

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Feminine, feministKANCHAN CHANDER (b. 1957)Devi Nouveau 4Mixed media on canvas board48 x 32 inchesThe torso has been central to Kanchan Chander’s work and she has imbued it with all that concerns her: The primal woman and its totemic attribution attenuated through the body proper. If these suggest a feminist viewpoint, it could hardly be wrong, even though Chander has been attracted towards the iconised popularity of cult women —Hollywood and Bollywood divas, and her own role model, the artist Frida Kahlo—whose faces feature in risible assemblages pieced together with lace, sequins and feathers. This painstaking and laborious homage and deification does not take away from her principled stand of femininity and feminism as complementary ideologies, the one as fantasy and an object of fetish, the other as a symbol of terrific and terrifying power. For her, the body is both trade in stock as well as reverential, both brothel and altar. They question the patriarchal view of society and how women view their own body in its everydayness as well as mystique.

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The artist as satiristFARHAD HUSSAIN (b. 1975)UntitledAcrylic on paper12 x 9 inchesNo one satirises our highly sexualised society like Farhad Hussain. A keen observer of social trends, Hussain mocks our pet peeves and fears. His paintings are often staged to resemble a farce of the kind that theatre often depicts. Hussain’s cast of characters revolves around the urban middle class, an influential, if inconsistent, constituency that is conservative as a group yet liberal in its individual capacity. He slowly constructs his scenes within the interiors of posh living rooms where the personalities of the protagonists are on open view. Using flat colour tones and an impossibly candy-coloured palette, he accentuates the play of emotions and physicalities, emphasising our response to situations in a farcical way. In these scenarios set within the umbrella of a family are the familiar and the shocking, the banal and the provocative.In forcing us to think outside our comfort zone, he reinforces stereotypes. The wide-eyed, brightly painted ingénues of his paintings are part of the tapestry of our lives. Each figure in his paintings forms an integral part of the relationships he explores in the form of a tableau or a diorama, lives laid out in front of our eyes as if for dissection and to fuel the rumour mills that keep our social discourses lubricated.

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Romancing the middle classNAYANAA KANODIA (b. 1950)Kadabari’s JoyrideOil on canvas48 x 36 inchesWithin the gentle parlour relationships that she paints with her sardonic eye, artist Nayanaa Kanodia has established the changing nuances in society, often allowing the viewer to be voyeur as well as participant in her delightful cameos of social life in 21st century India. Kanodia’s wickedly warm world is recreated using the naïf or naïve style in which she locates her people—couples mostly—within a quaint interior world of drawing rooms and bedrooms, going about their daily chores, resting, conversing, serving themselves tea, and sometimes stepping out of this enchanted world to treat themselves to a joyride, or shopping trip. Bringing a sense of humour that stops short of parody, she mimics the people who surround us, the charming socialite, the cheerful housewife, the chivalrous partner, even perhaps you and me, located in rooms filled with chintz textiles and period furniture. Folksy and witty simultaneously, Kanodia’s take on society is gentle instead of sharp, delivering a rebuke where necessary, but without the acerbic indictment of so many contemporary artists. The artist lets it be known that this is her own milieu that she finds joy in, warts and all.

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In a vanishing landSENAKA SENANAYAKE (b. 1951)RainforestOil on canvas48 x 60 inchesThis well-loved Sri Lankan artist has a huge fan following for his rainforest landscapes with their cheerful colours and dense vegetation amid which bloom anthuriums, birds-of-paradise and exotic tropical plants. What appears at first escapist is a documentation of a rapidly dwindling environment leading to that most catastrophic of disasters: Climate change. Still, in Senaka Senanayake’s’s underbrush, the vegetation is always lush with none of the decay and degradation. Amid the variegated and striped leaves flit butterflies and birds such as hornbills and hummingbirds, and the occasional fauna.Having once entered his rainforest, one parts the canvas leaf by leaf to discover a wonderful world that could arguably exist in a corner of one’s own garden. Senanayake’s forestscapes may consist of parakeets and heliconias but, thankfully, there are no serpents in his paradise.

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Innocent lustTHOTA VAIKUNTAM (b. 1942)Telangana Woman with PotAcrylic on canvas41 x 29 inchesThis Telangana-based artist did not have to look far for his muse before chancing on his iconic figures that are so popular among his collectors. There is something immensely appealing about Thota Vaikuntam’s Telangana doppelgangers— voluptuous women in gaily coloured saris, their blouses festooned with beads, their kohl-lined eyes suggestive at once of romance as well as passion, an erotic charge being a suggestive element in his paintings. The figures and their relationships in his works have been the subject of discourses around rural lifestyles and the position of women within its society whose independent femininity and sexuality form the whole and complete context of Vaikuntam’s oeuvre.

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The mortal immortalMANU PAREKH (b. 1939)Flowers from Heaven XIIIAcrylic on canvas100 x 80 inchesKnown principally as a landscape artist for his enduring ode to Benaras, Manu Parekh distills part of it in the manner of still-lifes or temple offerings. For Parekh, these have a subcutaneous erotic layer, a reference to fertility and lushness in nature, akin to human sexuality. Drawn to the idea of this robust sexuality, he notes that it forms part of the sacred in India. The flowering blooms, their intoxicating scents and overpowering attraction for birds and bees, and their consequent state of decay and the passing of life suffuses his canvases. Heady with the fragrance of ritualised ceremonies, Parekh revels in the classical allusion to these floral offerings in an abstracted sense. His representations, then, can be a suggestion of strewn petals, or they can be elaborate arrangements, but the bower he recreates holds within it the secrets of nature itself.

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