Timeless Narratives by Veteran Artists

Veterans’ Vision, as the name suggests, presents paintings by three senior artists from Bangalore. The collection featuring recent works by CS Krishna Setty, Chandranath Acharya and U Bhaskar Rao, encapsulates their unique visual vocabulary and individual voices, ranging from intimate and societal fantasies and apprehensions to vignettes from mythology and tradition. 

Krishna Setty’s metaphorical visuals interlace complex narratives around contemporary concerns. The forceful surrealistic imagery from his previous series has undergone transformation and depicts a perceptible shift towards abstraction. The hybrid creatures have receded and the recurring motifs and symbols have acquired ambiguous connotations, and are often hieroglyphic.

The mix-media works display significant textures and patterns, employed as an aesthetic device, and are remnants of the artist’s printmaking practice. The ambiguity of the hieroglyphs allows multiple readings into humanistic and existential angst, at the individual and a larger societal level. Fossilized remains or perhaps birthing grounds of indistinct forms, represent dreams or desires to form crucibles of compound visuals and narratives. The intense landscape generated, eerie and ethereal is disquieting, an infinite cauldron of life and consciousness with its associated anxieties.

Chandranath Acharya’s satirical commentary on the present political, social and psychological spectrum is situated at the threshold of fantasy and reality. His visual idiom combines a rare witticism with playfulness and surrealistic imagery. Royal figures, resplendent and clad in jewels and finery, indulge in ordinariness, a juxtaposition of opulence with the mundane, with undercurrents of satire and humour. 

Larger than life figures, surrounded by fantastical objects and creatures, form imposing portraits filled with pomposity, absurdity and grandeur. Decadence and mortality come together in a single frame with incongruous imagery, in incredibly sumptuous detail. Human conditions and emotions in all its exuberance, transience and intricacies, are portrayed adeptly with an underlying sense of mischief and tenderness. His extensive work in illustration and printmaking are clearly evident in the paintings.

Bhaskar Rao’s protagonists are primarily derived from mythology and visual and performing culture. These often narrate specific and recognizable instances and episodes, chronicling fragments of oral traditions and culture. Rooted in realism, with stylised and illustrative forms, vignettes from native landscapes, myths and mythology and traditions and rituals, etched in memory through time, are represented on the canvas.

The puppets form a popular leitmotif in his narration, a juxtaposition of the inanimate with the sentient and as an instrument of storytelling. Performance as an expression of human nature, culture and experience, and its associated connotations with social, philosophical and spiritual perspectives acts as a symbol of representation. 

The exhibition continues till September 22 at Fidelitus Art Gallery, Bangalore

All images courtesy the artists and gallery

Excerpted from the catalogue text by Nalini Malaviya

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A Tribute to Artist M.B. Patil

In this insightful article, H.A. Anil Kumar contemplates M.B. Patil’s artistic contribution to the arts, and discovers he has made a statement by just being the way he was and that for him, the act was more relevant than the product

It was already two decades since he had retired as an artist employed with the State Government (Department of Information and Broadcast), when M.B.Patil (born: Tikota, Bijapur, 1939-2017) passed away recently. When he had freshly retired in the late 1990s and held a solo show at ‘Images’ gallery, Bengaluru, another artist-friend of his, K.T.Shiva Prasad had inaugurated it and given a piece of advice to the exhibitor: “Patil has retired now as an employed-artist, let him be creative from now on”. Most in the crowd smiled, giggled and laughed at this tongue-in-cheek remark, while Patil himself had his usual smile, which was not easy to decipher. It was a prejudice that ‘an artist who is not a freelancer is not creative enough’ that was unveiled and vented out during this occasion. Artistic activities are bound to be defined by what art means in any given, specific situation.

Patil’s artistic works might be as mysterious as his smile was: his works can be broadly divided, style-wise, into three categories: the collages, folksy images and his demonstrations, mainly portraiture. The burnt-wood style, for which he has been often so remembered, squarely fits into his folksy style. Perhaps painterly folk representation was already a tradition among Karnataka artists. Like many of his contemporaries (Chandranath Acharya, R.M.Hadapad, S.G.Vasudev), he did meddle a bit with the art of art direction in a few docu-drama films. Often some artists of Karnataka have been so varied in their styles that any amount of categorization style-wise or otherwise, would become impossible (ex: the visual works of R.M.Hadapad and Shivarama Karantha’s literary oeuvre). On the contrary, some artists are so well known for their unique styles, that there are even too many imitators of them; and those who generated the style themselves get creatively imprisoned in this demand for the ‘politics-of-imitation’.