Joya Mukherjee Logue’s first exhibition in India, Those Who Walk Before Me, explores through a series of paintings her familial childhood memories of Ambala. While living and painting in small town Ohio in the United States, her painterly evocation bears the signs of images dredged from the haze of vivid remembrances. Figures bathed in sunlight and clad in bleached colours appear against Rajo Villa, the brick-coloured home in Ambala where Mukherjee spent her childhood holidays. Now hemmed in by the aggressively growing Sadar Bazaar, this home in the heart of the city symbolizes the peace and silence of another time.
A self-taught artist, Mukherjee Logue is like a diaryist of the momentary, her paintings appearing as flashes of remembered gestures, never loaded with signification but rooted with the stability of the sepia-tinted, family snapshot. If her work stands out for its small claims, the minor histories that it records are nevertheless weighty witnesses to the passage of time. Rajo Villa, now emptied and shut, its louvred windows closed to the encroaching din of the market, memorializes five generations of physicians in the Mukherjee family. In the silhouette of the building, she invokes a prabasi Bengali home in Haryana, bearing the Indo-Saracenic architecture popular in the late 19th and early 20h centuries. Usually combining the “Saracenic” (the British word for ‘drawn from Muslim culture’) with spires, stained glass, arches and decorative flourishes, this style was popular in grand public buildings like museums or hospitals, while in private homes, it bore the air of colonial grandeur.
Along with her home, Mukherjee Logue also depicts scenes of the market and the magnificent hospital building in Ambala. A yellow light that washes across these surroundings sets the tone for the staging of family occasions and reunions in Rajo Villa. Using old photographs as an aide memoire, such as one of her father in childhood, she memorializes a distant past. One may also recall here other paintings of women in domestic interiors, from Amrita Sher-Gil to Alice Neel’s portraits of black and Asian women in Harlem, or even more recently Nicole Eisenman’s intimate studies. Unlike Neel, who described herself a s “a collector of souls,” Mukherjee Logue’s women are deeply circumspect, giving away little emotion or family context. Like the figures milling around in Ambala’s bazaar, we may seem them as creatures of circumstance, bound to each other through blood ties. In the absence of a clear narrative, however, what we see are impressions of figures in pastel shades, imbued with the warm light of imagination and recall.
Over and above memorializing a family and its annual gatherings in a much loved home, the exhibition records transitions in time and a way of life that has receded into memory. The changes and turbulence that may follow the individuals beyond Rajo Villa are kept at bay; in this evocation, the lasting impression is of Mukherjee Logue’s use of light -- clear, still and luminous -- as it seals the paintings into a silent, peaceable communion. As a recollection of her family in their home, the exhibition is both a memorial and a tribute.
Those Who Walk Before Me was on at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, from August 27 to September 17, 2024.