Krishen Khanna: Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings from 1958 to 2001

Painting is a practical thing and words are so windy. If this be so, how might one breezily give out commentary on something, something so rounded off to the last dot, that one may experience its presence, its discreet silence, and not babble? Oh yes, and alas, we are perforce obliged to formulate the experiences we undergo in make-do language but still the felt press of a given real experience eludes words, at least largely so.

But obliged to be back to the grind, I could say the obvious, namely, that Krishen Khanna has a large, varied and accomplished body of work accrued to his credit during the last many decades. Further, that one has enjoyed those in their different incarnations these many years. But right now, and what I have in mind are certain of his later conte crayon series on paper and especially those titled Rumi III and others in the series. These at least to date, surely, bring to a high water mark what the painter has been trying to voice all along in one of the more significant moments of his artistic carrier. Here the moral weight, that which had been in evidence in certain of his compositions earlier (including Che of yore) matures to a telling gravity, a rare catholicity of intent in fact. If those earlier works sometimes reflected the travails of the human spirit up against the dilemmas of time present, or else the politics of time, here we have the picturisation of the 'politics of eternity' - in other words that particular order of politics which absorbs the lesser politics of life in the very penultimate levels of being and becoming.

The great inwardness that these apparently simple works have arrived at is not merely amusing, nor is it sensuously flattering, indeed it has done away with the accouterments of the passing show in total. This is done not in any misanthropy, but out of a precious concern for the truth of human existence on earth. The withdrawn stillness and self sufficience of the figure in question is remarkable. Each fold of the Sufi's garment, as his corporeal being, have been so sensitively woven into one compelling whole as helps radiate those of the solemn messages as quietly discipline the unruly soul of the viewer. This is not a pretty picture study in unworldliness, rather its mood represents the widest, the most dispassionate and disinterested grasping of that particular universal circumference of the world in which one is centered. As a corollary, only through such or similar personal attunements the acts of our moral life may hope to be sweetly reasonable.

Some art works re-pattern the wonky, disordered threads of the prospective viewers deluded, hopelessly confused inner being. I believe Krishen's works of this nature do precisely that. They bring us back to us, by the very denials and a shunning of sundry artistic blandishments. Here, in the execution of these compositions an amazing artlessness has been attained, perhaps after many trials in all likelihood, and which of course most be the same with other serious practioners of art. The artist now comes without weapons, that is, unarmed with no guiles or wiles to win you. His work is not posing for the prospective viewer at all; it does not mean to woo him. So absorbed is he in the craft of the art in the making, as in the glimpsed unusual vision, that he is lost to the world. Yes, so absorbed or so pin-pointed is he on core of all which is that he is absolutely unaware of us. And in this itself is his work's magnetic drawing power-totally unsolicited, as it happens. Over here two sorts of masteries are in evidence; first, the artist's studious self-editing of his own hard earned previous prepossessions, in other words that shedding of a ballast, which in any case in his case was never too deadening. Secondly, it is, as it were, the severe winding on itself of the spool of his life's elan-the purposive narrowing of the field of its operations, but so only with a view to express the highest available seriousness; or else the meaning of being human - that is, to be true to yourself. Only in being thus true, do the other tertiary goods of life begin to seem of little attraction. This is why these particular compositions, and that without the least overt intention, silence our usual earthly fidgetings and frettings.

If you go over the lot of the artist's sufficiently wide variety of assays - be those in oil, pencil, charcoal, and these on whatever surface it may be, you have recourse to several other sensations then those I described here. The delectations of warm color in the Bandwallah series at their choicest; in some conte works, the theme of pathos; nostalgia in the fine portraits of his personal reminiscences. None of these other compositions are a simplistic documentation, rather are they the imaginative recapturing of a time past, of fast fading images, but such which are yet somehow still very much instinct in us - and just refuse to go away. Then too there are those works, which take leaves out of the greater epics - The Mananharata or Biblical lore. Those are not illustrations but expressive of the artist's deep passion for potent and ever recurring key life symbols lodged in the memories of each of the worlds great traditions. In these are life's polarities and tensions, that is, those dramatic crises which reflect the nagging questions and situations in which mankind is ever caught, despite the seeming parallel human comedy which life looks like at still other moments of time.

Most of these compositions have been rendered with a quiet control, but yet they harbor a suspense which betokens the impending, dire, but still ennobling next move in life's play. That huddle of humans in the Last Sermon, for instance, has been redone in the painter's very own idiom and in no other. The elders are here gathered together, like moths around a white flame, the flame being the faith that activates the movement of their own pulse. The real meaning of this new chosen faith is to become the faith that moves mountains. In another ambience we see the smuggling out of baby Krishna to safety - a face of selfless devotion in the face of an ever- present threat. Thus, with these and other envisionings the painter of delighting works like melon eaters, and not to forget Sumi paintings and the ever curious crows, gives his theme a raise much as key characters in legends and epics are wont to do, as in the Rumi series; those are recreated in nutshell, and nevertheless to make us experience the full import of a singular life else of a salient truth. In those works, as I already said, the painter's draftsmanship, and his pin-pointing of the momentous message in so brief a space is consummate. Nothing is left to chance, and yet the thing appears as if sui generis, natural, not the usual toiled and troubled over, if otherwise excellent art object.

The artist here has so completely withdrawn from the scene that it allows his dramatis personae to speak single mindedly, undisturbed. This order of work becomes independent, the feel of struggle vanishing into thin air. Lasting, unlike ephemeral art experiencings come our way only via this route - a kind of spiritual exercise. And it is so that even via the services of art/craft you return right back into the middle of the heart of life itself—a life that hangs on a frail thread. This especial moment is one of life, not of only art, much as it is construed by a blase public, and which public unfortunately is growing too large for comfort. The other public, divides the two categories of art and life, but only as a matter of convenience, for purposes of analysis, nothing more, so that the deeper morality of an indissoluble union, cannot be undone. But when so, then at great personal cost. And yet one could say, that the subjects that our painter tackles shows that every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with his conception of harmony. This makes his soul a battlefield (as in the Mahabharata series) and where the forces, such as this reconciliation, fight those that do not, and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world. And they are great works of art if the forces involved are immensely numerous, and if the artist can faithfully report the conflict he knows as he knows it in his heart. The artist cannot tell you exactly what happened, any more than the soldiers in the battle can tell you exactly what has happened.

And yet the true artist gives you precious signals and clues as are vital to the emotional understanding of spiritual situations. This our painter has done unerringly in the choice of his offerings. And these particular mature works are, but of course, of a non-sentimental order. For, after all, here the artist has an intention of expressing his experiencings of realities that are as determined and exclusive as the tree's intention of becoming a tree, and by passing all his material through his imagination, and there experiencing it, he achieves the same identity with what he makes as the growing tree does. Now neither tree nor artist has eyes, neither has ears, neither is intelligent, simply they are becoming what they make. The artist puts out his force and it becomes his painted image as the tree puts out its force and makes a branch. Both know how much force to put out and where next to restart it, because of having achieved this identification with their creation. In short, here there is no alien note, which rebels against the whole. So, in Krishen's finest, there is the peace of unity.

But of course the sentimental artist - and we have not a few - is on the way to becoming nothing. This one has ears, he has eyes, he is being intelligent, he is playing a game; he is moving certain objects according to certain rules in front of spectators. Those objects one may take as the isolated units of his material, which he has passed through his imagination by an unfortunately discontinuous process. Thus come those weak upshots, even though to communicate some experience or other to an audience is no trouble to an artist, since in point of fact giving formal expression to a work of art is to interpret ones experience to oneself, so that one merely permits the audience to look over one's shoulder. But to condition the expression out of the regard for the effect on one's audience's mind is to bring into the artistic process a factor so little of a constant, since that mind is perpetually changing according to the social and intellectual movements of the time, and one's understanding of it is as unstable, that it is like a play comparable to like playing cricket on a busy thoroughfare. Our present painter, Krishen Khanna, thus, gives us a lesson in creative concentration, a discipline of mind, and that itself in turn being based on his deeper concerns coincident with the fortunes or fate of mankind.

The weightier of art works, as those this painter has labored to bring to birth - are, as such, necessities, not luxuries. They feed our need to be human. These select ones are just as capable as classics of literature, and quite as capable of information about the whirling world. It is true literature alone presents us with information in a form in which the intellect can use her accomplishments of logic and the like; but they, the greater paintings present us with material which does not wait for completion by the intellect, which rounds off in the present, which does not need to be treated as a premise because it is itself a complete syllogism. Thus this particular order of art, like all genuine art, whatever the media, gives us invaluable information about our human universe. And for this very reason, it is an art of consequence, and thereby it places responsibility on our own shoulders. To look at art works with a less demanding eye is to do the muses dishonour, and therefore to demean culture.

- Keshav Malik (New Delhi, September 15, 2001)