About
The Case of Vanishing Innocence
If we link Narendra Pal Singh's series of paintings titled La Dolce Vita of 1995 with that of 1997 titled Unending Tales, we may discover an intriguing shift of focus in his recent paintings in acrylic and watercolour The shift is rather nostalgic - from the sprawling chaos of humans lost in small towns and villages of his own time, to a series of imagery culled from the past, encoding a vanishing way of life. He is wistfully looking back to an age of innocence when happiness did not require much of breathless running around, when happiness did not necessarily mean rampant consumerism.
To my mind the present series is his critique of the contemporary Gadarene March to 'happiness' as well as silent and tearful reminiscing about the simple faith in life that nce enabled men, women and children to absorb life-sustaining joys from the world around. The series is like a Clown's laughter, beneath whose painted smirk tears remain frozen.
But first we look into the pictorial means for conveying his painterly critique. The echnique of figuration that he has developed over the past years seems to have taken wo directions In his watercolours of village beauties, with their heavy ornamentation md tattooed decoration: Narendra Pal remembers the remote miniature practices, the lattened profiles of the 'high art' Nayikas and strong juxtaposition of tropical coloures. Fhe other kind of figuration, especially when he choose his imagery from rural life, :reated like flattened rag-dolls bought at the village fair. And they are very much alive vith their wide range of human emotions.
He goes back to the time when the young hung their 'jhula' from the sturdy branch of tree and had their ecstatic swing up in the air during the monsoon. The perverse thrill a roller-coaster ride was not necessary to tell them that they were alive; the time vhen village bride entered a new life in a 'doli' borne by 'kahars', humming and weating along the tree-lined path; the time when the village rang with sound of the hurning of butter. Then it was a thrill to have a peep into the kaleidoscope and their Pagination ran wild with the rotating pictures of the exotic scenes. The TV screen's 'virtual reality' of the blood and gore of violence or disaster did not tell them that the orld may not always remain a safe place.
- Santo Datta
