ART REVIEW: “My Indian Faces”

Review:

 

Nesa Gschwend

“My Indian Faces”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(exhibition held at: Chitrakala Parishath, Bangalore, March 2006)

 

 

(I) Drawing the Memory of an Act: Nesa Gschwend’s drawings ‘depict’ faces. Her initial ‘act of drawing’ the faces adds a lot of ‘meaning’ to her final facial expressions. The expression of the artist’s face and other bodily movement, while ‘making’ these faces, draws our attention towards her ‘act of drawing’ more intensely. The strategy that she employs to ‘draw’ our attention even away from her ‘drawn’ images, is a curious ‘cultural act’ in itself. The intended act to draw our ‘gaze’ away from what is already being ‘drawn’ is to bring your gaze back to the drawing. This ‘break’ between these two ‘acts of gazing’ changes the appearance of any existing drawing by Nesa! We see what actually doesn’t exist, while we imagine the act that created this non-existence!

 

She ‘treats’ the drawing sheets with wax and the waxed, drawn papers with pencil marks, simultaneously. It appears to be a simplistic act of preparing a base to contain an image upon it. However this domestic, casual process of ‘preparing’ and ‘creating’ a drawing itself tends to become a sort of performance. This understanding of the performance of the artistic hand helps us to grasp the drawings more clearly. In the due process, the surface (paper) and the image (drawings) begin to exchange roles. Waxed textures and the drawn/sketched faces mutually refuse to ‘mark’ their own boundaries, independent of each other. Hence Nesa has created a set of drawings or/and marks which finally refuse the historic essence of image-making: i.e. the idea that a drawing is an image created by marks ‘upon’ a surface. And the marks and surfaces are made up of ‘mutually different’ materials! In Nesa’s case, the surface and image intermingle wherein the ‘image’ and ‘background’ continuously ‘float’ ambiguously. Nesa’s portrait-drawings express the humiliation of being unable to face, to face the impossible. The smudged pencil marks, the clear lines that define specific physical features, play a dual role of ‘representing’ and ‘suggesting’ the elements that constitute a portraiture, both at the same time.

 

 

 

 

The tactile quality of the wax plays a dualistic role:

(a) as a ‘mark’ of experience that an aged face might carry upon itself—they are autobiographical anecdotes, of, say, a mature personality. The pencil marks have the ability to evoke an experience that one wants to ‘erase off’ one’s mind, forever.

(b) the admixture of wax and drawing that becomes a physical and sensory matter (like in a relief work) that one can feel, often even without touching it.Often it seems that there is only the ‘memory’ of a drawing on the ‘memory’ of a paper.

 

 Currently we look at a sketch-on-a-paper and realize that it has become an act of the past. It is an act, a mark and a design that has freshly turned into an antique! Hence, there is a chance to misappropriate these drawings as antiquarian, which would be insulting the network of the movement of the fingers, the hand and the physique of the artist who is, by profession, also a contemporary performer.

A set of lines make a drawing if it exists within the framework of a specific time and space. Nesa’s marks make us believe that they ‘are’ so. Factually speaking, they ‘were’ so! She makes marks on a paper, with graphite pencil that ‘repeats’ itself, as a pattern on different papers, further. Her drawings evoke an altogether different experience herein. In a way the same drawing seems to appear on different paper surfaces, at the same time-space configuration.

 

To repeat her working method once again: Nesa marks, draws, treats the papers with wax, redraws again on it, until there is no difference left between the marked textures of the wax and the pencil. Mostly the marks evoke the memory of tender-like faces: children, men, women and the kind, if the viewer wishes to look at it in a media-less way (like say, the way we grasp the same story in a film and a drama as if there is no mutual media difference that affects the narration). Gradually we become aware of the paradox evident within these marks that vary from abstract to representational drawings.

 

 

(II) Framing anthropological sites: Let’s assume Nesa’s pencil marks to be ‘maps’ of a sort. Mapping a set of marked, gestural drawing evokes the watchful eyes to redirect us to look at the set of drawings as a bunch of lines, a set of lines as a bunch marks etc., i.e., anything or something other than a ‘static visual’.

 

So this leads us to follow the ‘trace’ or the ‘movement of the formation of a line (not ‘a line after it is framed!’) as and when it is being formed! In other words, a display of several of Nesa’s drawings in ‘any’ order, in ‘any’ particular light evokes several physical movement of the hand that can/has also created them. These faces are not clearly visible, but their ambiguity in all their tactileness is!

 

So while ‘looking’ at these drawings as mutually independent entities. They do not let the gaze settle upon them for too long. Hence Nesa’s graphic pencil marks, due to the way and reasons in which they are formed, are anthropological sites. You ‘see’ the drawing as an extension of a mark in differing times, at differing space. So, the Kantian notion that any objects worth an experience is bound by time-space formula is teased by Nesa. Also this teasing takes the form of different forms, yet to come, always in the future. Through this writeup, for instance, it takes the form of an anthropological mapping. It maps the movement of the artist, but not in a motorized way. The wax textures and pencil lines and smudges commix, violating the rule of a performer and platform. This is the essence of Nesa’s performance while sketching.

 

(III) Final Display: When scores of Nesa’s face drawings are displayed together, they refuse to co-exist. Is it a single image seen differently in different frames? If so, the speed in which we need to grasp them as ‘one’ is erased (as if we are watching a movie film role in slots, frame after frame). The tactile quality of the waxed surface ‘seem’ to push the drawing one layer behind. It could even be seen from behind. These machine-made papers are turned into hand-made (manually) waxed papers. Is it a nostalgic yearning for the ‘real’ mindscape when a rendering tend to become mechanical? Each paper share the same waxed, plastic and graphite, graphic presence but each of them seem to contain a ‘mobile vision’ within. The face might laugh, be sullen, angry and finally, might refuse to reveal any of its expression. The ‘feel’ of these waxed-images is ‘felt’ even without ‘touching them’. There is a whole list of accepted ‘representational’ notions that Nesa puts to stake and teases in the process of creating one waxed-image. And her intention is not merely to draw the viewers’ experience of such ruptured notion towards the permanency of the drawing process and ambiguity of the still, drawing-faces.///