First published on 23rd August 2024
There is a naive pleasure in summarizing the experience of visiting If We Knew the Point and Magic in the Square -- Kiran Nadar Museum of Art’s current retrospectives on Amitava Das and Mohan Samant’s artistic legacies -- with the following expletives: unfamiliar and incongruent shapes; unpredictable and disorienting lines; a distortion of figures and reality, where swirling brushstrokes, dragging cuts and bleeding colours exclaim a cloudburst of mania. There is almost a mischievous cry of “Even I can make this!” that makes the seasoned critic’s ears cringe and the rest of us chuckle. With an unconventional ephemera of tickets, labels, passes and stamps puncturing the halls, the exhibitions leave us puzzled and pondering about the processes that resulted in seminal works such as Samant’s “Celebration of the Dead” (1987) and Das’s “We Have Already Gone Beyond Whatever We Have” (2011).
This, in my opinion, is a good thing. What begins as a discombobulating display of two highly distinct visual practices -- separated by decades of creative trajectories, and resulting in transformations of the very tenets of art-making -- materializes into a roguish yet intelligent subversion. Even as they are mounted separately, the artists and exhibitions appear to be in a conversation with each other in a way that challenges classical approaches to art, ushering us to an event that expresses and evokes, but hardly explains. This is where Samant and Das’s genius comes into its own; not merely in the pronounced, rich imagery their technical experiments present, but also in a feeling -- what the Andalusian poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, described as el duende, a heightened state of emotion -- that their works excite. In their transfigurations of shapes and forms rests an unbearable lightness of the drawn line; all-embracing and interminably inspiring as it gets thinner and thinner.
It is with prolific purpose that an awe-inspiring tranquillity and heightened ethereality measures itself alongside an aggressive visual practice of serrated gashes and rough cuts. This play of opposing forces is a fundamental impulse shared by Samant and Das (temporally and spiritually). It is an impulse that cannot be easily described or explained, but that nevertheless creatively stitches experiences, memories, conversations and lessons onto the many marks and gestures on their canvases. Observing Das’s untitled collages from 2021, we are made aware of an assemblage of space that cycles through the layering and elimination of drawings, paints and ephemeral objects. Working with tempera on mounted palm leaf paper, Das’s topography -- equally serene and chaotic, a farmland turned battleground -- becomes a tactile curiosity for the viewer, allowing for a much closer appreciation of it (physically as well as conceptually). Such eagerness is also visible in Samant’s experiments. His creative individualism pushed the modernist towards possibilities of transcending the two-dimensional plane within the limited surface of paper. By consciously integrating multiple mediums, his practice created a dialogue between various epochs of art-making: a dialogue that, for instance, rendered the simple act of leisure travel in “Tourists at the Sea Festival” (1979) into a cubist symphony of complex forms. His highly textured surfaces -- such as in “The Fireside Camp” (1980) and “Night Show” (1981) -- contain an assemblage of watercolours that come together in a kaleidoscopic effect with strings, sands, plaster and other objects.
The scale with which If We Knew the Point -- the title taken from Roberto Juarroz’s poem Poesia Vertical -- defines Das’s visual practice builds an exciting common factor between his and Samant’s physical and psychological approaches to space. In the vertical drawings Das made during his stay in New York in 2006, there is an embedded richness and solidity of the colour black. In each piece, created on an elongated sketchpad of 20 x 9 inches, the joints and limbs suggestively introduce transcendence: an elevated metaphor that ascends onto growth but equally spirals upwards to convey disarray and confinement within an urban landscape. In the curatorial note, Das explains these works further, saying “I was on the 42nd floor in Manhattan, Upper East Side. The condo was in this concrete jungle, all vertical … In these works, some forms are tragic… and in a way, life is both tragic and funny.”
Remarkably, this tragicomic solemnity was already evident in Samant’s art, when the same city hosted him more than four decades before Das’s arrival. Samant’s works incisively deals with the occult: for instance, “Celebration of the Dead” (1987) introduces modalities that visualize cultural perceptions around death. In satiating his hunger for resolving the tensions between Eastern and Western artistic inclinations, Samant’s modernist investigations would often infuse symbols from different mythologies to understand the moveable feast of death that knocked on our doors. His works potently transcend from solidity to ethereality, from darkness to light. By compositionally exploring forms and shapes that have been as figurative as the Ajanta murals, and as abstract as African tribal masks, Samant’s figures dissipate and become skeletal, signifiers of decay, exacting against the human imprint. “Masked Dance for the Ancestors” (1994) makes this abundantly clear: his figures lie buried on the surface of the canvas, an oblivion that is left for the viewer to grasp.
This vanishing yet irreducible figure is important for both Samant and Das. The two exhibitions make us aware of abstract physiognomies in precise anatomies -- some ghostly as apparitions, some athletic, playing with what is tangible. In choreographed methods of sticking, sketching, tearing, cutting and pasting image, text and assembled layers, the artist’s brush -- ranging from permanent markers, ball point pens, ink and coloured pens, correction pens, and oil and acrylic paints -- dances with disjointed limbs to create bodies that edge towards the spectral. In Das’s art, the human form experiences sublimation, rupturing and mutation that speaks to the violence of the world. At times, his figures become Sisyphean, toiling against an existentialism felt in every bone. His totemic heads from the 1980s begin losing structure; a faceless boundary bereft of identification, yet imbued with identifiers -- of a feeling, of el duende. Similarly, Samant’s figures, seen in works like “Black Magician” (1996), signal the making of a symbolic cartography: an emotive expression resulting from him sifting through the cave paintings of Lascaux and Altamira, the Indian traditions of Kangra and Jain miniatures, and the galleries of The Met and the MoMA. He captures the modern man in perennial anxiety, a heap of lines almost ready to disappearintoamass of abstract curves and lines.
More recently, Das’s brilliantly tactile assemblages -- with their irregular terrain stitching a multitude of cultures -- have become sweepingly austere and are marked by an extreme of minimalism, purity and feeling. What was once familiarly representational, has elementally shifted towards a configuration of dots, lines and strokes, that are now his framework for the visible as well as the imagined. This play between order and dissolution allows him to realize the drawing as a work in itself, and not as a prior commitment towards the making of something else. Moreover, this is hardly a reticence from expression. Rather, it is a seeking of that which is essential -- the possibility of a single line accessing invisible spaces, abstract forces and our elusive selves. This is an approach that sits satisfyingly well with Samant’s depth: overpowering yet precise, the breadth of his visual practice keenly embraces a range of mediums that are subversive of and liberating from older art traditions. It is here that If We Knew the Point and Magic in the Square become organically reciprocal: in the chase of an upside-down figure, precariously dislodged by time and space, suspended over a tenuous base, constantly fracturing and being pushed to the edge, yet still standing.
If We Knew the Point and Magic in the Square are on at KNMA, Saket, New Delhi, from July 27 to September 30, 2024.
Shankar Tripathi is an arts writer, editor and curator based out of New Delhi.