About
Between the nostalgic memories of a golden past and the excruciating realities of the quotidian daily life there moves an individual in the guise of a commoner, a migrant, a saint, a yogi and a youthful young bridegroom. These characters or the various disguises of the very same man are created by Amit Slathia in his paintings, as for him, they are the means to redeem his own life from the existential problems not only posed to him all by himself but also by the whole society. Amit does not seek to produce characters that could appear as surrogate personalities of his own artistic self. Instead, he attributes them with well defined characteristics and through them he explores his own existence and sees where he could converge his ideas about life and times and where he could diverge from them and take a different path of exploration.
Existential issues are often discarded from the discourse of contemporary art because contemporary art often tends to celebrate the present and its spectacles. Theoreticians of the contemporary art say that everything in art happens in simulacrum where there are no differences between the original and the copies. When the issue of original is ruled out, then there are very less chances of existential problems as it is the question of originality of an individual that often sends the creative person into existential throes. However, contemporary art cannot always be taken for the pure celebration of the spectacles. Though we consider contemporary life as a carnival where various fashions, styles and languages find their own distinct expressions, there are certain locations within this carnival where the real human issues pertaining to the existential problems of an individual are articulated and presented. It is in one such space that we find the works of Amit relevant and worth pondering.
Amit comes from Jammu and currently he resides in Delhi. Like many other creative people who come to the metropolitan city of Delhi from various corners of India, Amit too considers himself as a migrant and there is always this question of belonging and non-belonging setting the tone of his works. The sense of belonging comes from one's conscious dialogue with the birth place as a location that defines the fundamental aesthetic and cultural formation of that person. In the process of dislocation and settlement in a new place, one finds this dialogue being disrupted and there occurs a need to re-articulate the parameters of this dialogue.
A new sense of belonging has to be found in order to make the daily life tolerable and at each juncture one would find the disparities between the older and the new dialogues with the place and space. This leads to a double distancing; on the one hand, one gets distanced from the place of birth and on the other he or she would find the new location also distanced by the dialogical disparity.
It is in this gap that one could see the existential issues becoming all the more present and demand a clear articulation in different mediums. Amit, though he is not averse to the idea of urbanization nor is he a stranger to the urban ways of living, finds the pace of urbanization in the location of his dwelling a bit unsteadying. This feeling of giddiness makes him to delayer the aspects of urbanization against the backdrop of an imaginary/imagined past. Naturally, in the cultural imagination of the creative people, past appears as an anti-thesis to culture. It directly goes into 'nature' where the signposts of enculturation have not yet appeared. This is a sylvan land, as imagination could device and draw, and an artist would feel that it is in this rural setting human life flows unhindered. Hence, we could see Amit re-evaluating his present urban existence against the imagined knowledge about the rural past.
Amit's works operate between two imaginaries; one, the imagined rural past where conflict between human beings and nature does not exist, and two, the imagined urban present where everything is in conflict with everything else. Hence, caught between these two imaginaries about the past and present, an artist like Amit feels the need to devise a plan to negotiate the imaginaries and as a thinking human being, he knows for sure that the negotiations through aesthetics cannot give solutions to the practical problems that one faces on a daily basis. The existential dilemma hence comes forth is not about the meaning of life, but unlike in the modernist period, it is all about understanding the ruptures between the two dialogues of distancing (from the birth place and place of living) and the ruptures between the two imaginaries (of the desirable past and the unbearable present).
In that sense, Amit's characters are not the isolated people in a crowded city or street as in the case of many veteran painters like Ram Kumar and Krishen Khanna who used to paint angst ridden people in the cities and streets. On the contrary, Amit's protagonists are bold people who could counter gaze the people who look at them with a sense of wonder or strangeness. They are contained in their own happiness as well as predicament. They could reflect upon their present and past lives and at the same time they could detach from the whole scene of action and get into a kind of yogic sleep. They could do penance and they could celebrate the happy days in their lives. They could go for a haircut and they could just ride a motorbike. There is a kind of celebration in them at that same time what makes Amit's protagonists philosophically existential is their sense of detachment from what they are seen doing. They are at once in and out of their action; this I believe, is possible only to those artists who could understand the rupture in the dialogue between the past and present as well as the awareness about the two imaginaries as explained before.
Leaving the human protagonists behind for a while, it would be interesting to see the non-human imageries that Amit often brings into his pictorial schemes. From the very beginning of his creative career he has been interested in the image of a motorbike (which is popularly known as a 'bike' or 'two-wheeler' in India). Amit paints them again and again, in various locations, in various contexts and in various ways. At times they appear as iconic figures filling in the canvas and at times they come as the property of the protagonist as in the case of a bridegroom getting ready to take off in his bike. These bikes are not painted realistically. They look more like rusted and abandoned when seen from a distance but a closer look would reveal that they are painted quite meticulously and their bodies contain a landscape verging into the notions of abstraction.
How does a bike matter to Amit? What does a bike in fact do in his works? The answers for these questions should be sought in the explanation that the artist himself gives about his works. For him, a bike is a connecting link between the rural past and the urban present. He says that he has been seeing so many people in his village using bike as a mode of conveyance and transportation. They use bike not only for traveling but also for carrying things between villages and cities. Therefore, Amit envisions bikes as a new age beast of burden. At the same time he considers it as an entity which has a life of its own. The most interesting parts of these bikes are the rear view mirrors fitted on to the handles. These rear view mirrors form and integral part of the idea that Amit would like to convey through the image of these bikes.
Rear view mirrors are fixed for negotiating the traffic by looking at the backside. While the rider/driver pushes his energies forward in the act of riding forward, he need to see what is exactly happening behind in order to avoid traffic hazards and accidents. Here, from the material plane, these rear view mirrors take off and gain the status of the sublime metaphors. They connect the present with the past and in other words, the artist would like to say that one cannot detach from the past completely. The present actions are directed and negotiated by the momentum and understanding gather from the past. Even one could interpret that these mirrors are the reflections one's own identity and at times they would appear as futuristic vision, thereby creating a link between the past, present and the future. These rear view mirrors are one of the interesting metaphors created by Amit in his paintings.
Another pivotal metaphor in Amit's works is a bunch of dish antennas. Dish antennas have changed the visual appearance of the households; on the one hand, these dish antennas bring in several television channels and they serve the purpose of being the windows to the world and on the other hand, the presence of these dish antennas in the house tops have made each household look like a military installation. A bird's eye view of any locality would bring forth a new picture with these dish antennas mounted on the houses. Amit gives them a metaphorical meaning. For him these antennas are the signals of change. These antennas, when seen above the head of a man in yogic posture, come to stand in for the kind of spiritual communication that he has with the higher spirits. At the same time when we see it in a different light we could interpret these antennas as the communication devices that do not leave a person alone. The human beings today are filled with unwanted and unasked for information and ideas thanks to the proliferation of information technology. Seen in this context, these antennas in Amit's works appear as the tools of a subtle critique that the artist introduces in the contemporary discourse on socio-cultural and political practices.
Incursions of artificial materials and objects in human lives and its locations come to Amit as a grave artistic concern. The plastic bottle that we see in many of his works including the versions of an image of a way side barber and the man who sits in front of him, highlights how in the name of beautification and pruning, we come addicted to the use of plastic utensils. By incorporating the bottle images in many of his works, Amit also suggests the ongoing water-crisis all over the world. Thanks to the mindless urbanization process, human beings are subjected to the calamities caused by lack of water. Global economics functions in a different way and many of the future wars would be fought for the control of water resources. Knowing these as the outcome of urbanization, Amit through his works sends out a warning signal to the world. He also brings in the images of water tanks and tower clocks in order to suggest that they were the iconic structures that had controlled the human lives once and now they have been displaced by the plastic bottles. These water tanks and clock towers are also painted the way Amit paints the bike. He decorates them with creepers and plants and their presence frame the rupture between the past and the present.
Off late, Amit has started taking special interest in making the landscapes more definitive and often they appear as a counter thesis to the sprawling urban locations. Also, as a part of his maturing artistic process, Amit has now shown interest in subtle political critique. Giving a new dimension to his works, he paints the images of chairs, egg racks and so on in order to suggest the political wrangling and the tug of war for power. Political satire has become one of the defining factors. And his growing awareness of the changing world has made him an artist who is concerned about the depletion of wild life and nature and this concern is seen in many of his paintings where he paints the images of animals anxiously waiting for water and greenery.
Johny M L
Delhi, December, 2011
