By Aveek Sen - The Telegraph - Kolkata, IndiaFriday, August 10, 2007
The attempt to use traditional techniques and modes of representation to create an individual vision of the ‘modern’ unites the two accomplished artists reviewed here.
In each case, there is a skilled and loving engagement with a particular craft, naturally inherited or consciously mastered. The work that comes out of that mastery, in its self-conscious wit, playfulness or stylization, is necessarily contemporary.
But questions arise about how this modernity could evolve. Where will the work go from here, if the artist chooses to remain faithful to the demands of his or her chosen craft or tradition?
Miniatures (Gallery Sanskriti, until August 15) brings together the work of Mahaveer Swami and Ariane Mercier. Each artist revives, and plays with, in his or her own exquisitely fine way, the Bikaner and the Mughal/Persian schools of miniature painting.
Swami’s little paintings fall into two groups. First, a series of Sufi heads, and of single or grouped Sufi figures. Their upturned eyes, delicate hands and long beards, done with astonishing virtuosity, create an effect of mystical fineness that evokes the spiritual and aesthetic ambience within which such an art is perfected and savoured.
Then there are the figures of workers, craftsmen and social types, either plying their trade or invoked through wonderfully detailed depictions of their tools: goldsmiths, ironsmiths, carpenters, musicians, thakurs, doctors, accountant, bhistis and khajanchis.
There is also a series of toys and tiloniya (hanging birds made of stuffed cloth). Perhaps what inspires these finely done images is a kind of love — for the mystics and the spirituality they practised, for the ordinary people and the crafts they plied, and for the art of miniature painting itself and the bits of history it beautifully depicts.
There is also a series of toys and tiloniya (hanging birds made of stuffed cloth). Perhaps what inspires these finely done images is a kind of love — for the mystics and the spirituality they practised, for the ordinary people and the crafts they plied, and for the art of miniature painting itself and the bits of history it beautifully depicts.
Ariane Mercier’s delicate pictures (natural pigments on paper, of the same size as Swami’s images) are another kind of sophisticated and subtle-souled homage to Bikaner miniature-painting.
Her “Bikaner Sweets” series — each depicting an intricately confected sweetmeat in paper-foil — savours the delicious and the ephemeral.
So does her “Ice-Candy” series — ice-lollies and shaped granitas, creatures of a curious, nonhuman mildness and innocence, who seem to be touchingly oblivious of the shortness of their lives.
She also paints, in sharp and loving detail, fragments of Bikaner walls of bricks and of stones, their tops lined with broken glass.
Then there are the maps — topographical surveys, with rivers, hills and temples, creating patterns and arabesques that look like fantastical flowers, leaves and mushrooms. This, too, is an art of diminution, bringing out a tenderness that we must feel, with the artist, for the ordinary, the fragile and the small.
[pictures: Sufi Head 14, by Mahaveer Swami (left); Sweetmeat 02, by Ariane Mercier (right).
Swami’s little paintings fall into two groups. First, a series of Sufi heads, and of single or grouped Sufi figures. Their upturned eyes, delicate hands and long beards, done with astonishing virtuosity, create an effect of mystical fineness that evokes the spiritual and aesthetic ambience within which such an art is perfected and savoured.
Then there are the figures of workers, craftsmen and social types, either plying their trade or invoked through wonderfully detailed depictions of their tools: goldsmiths, ironsmiths, carpenters, musicians, thakurs, doctors, accountant, bhistis and khajanchis.
There is also a series of toys and tiloniya (hanging birds made of stuffed cloth). Perhaps what inspires these finely done images is a kind of love — for the mystics and the spirituality they practised, for the ordinary people and the crafts they plied, and for the art of miniature painting itself and the bits of history it beautifully depicts.
There is also a series of toys and tiloniya (hanging birds made of stuffed cloth). Perhaps what inspires these finely done images is a kind of love — for the mystics and the spirituality they practised, for the ordinary people and the crafts they plied, and for the art of miniature painting itself and the bits of history it beautifully depicts.
Ariane Mercier’s delicate pictures (natural pigments on paper, of the same size as Swami’s images) are another kind of sophisticated and subtle-souled homage to Bikaner miniature-painting.
Her “Bikaner Sweets” series — each depicting an intricately confected sweetmeat in paper-foil — savours the delicious and the ephemeral.
So does her “Ice-Candy” series — ice-lollies and shaped granitas, creatures of a curious, nonhuman mildness and innocence, who seem to be touchingly oblivious of the shortness of their lives.
She also paints, in sharp and loving detail, fragments of Bikaner walls of bricks and of stones, their tops lined with broken glass.
Then there are the maps — topographical surveys, with rivers, hills and temples, creating patterns and arabesques that look like fantastical flowers, leaves and mushrooms. This, too, is an art of diminution, bringing out a tenderness that we must feel, with the artist, for the ordinary, the fragile and the small.
[pictures: Sufi Head 14, by Mahaveer Swami (left); Sweetmeat 02, by Ariane Mercier (right).
Visit the exhibition at Gallery Sanskriti, 5C, Alipore Park Road, Kolkata 700 027, until August 15; see all the paintings on line at http://www.gallerysanskriti.com/Current_Exhibition_Mahaveer.php]
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