CATALOG: M.S.Amarnath’s Paintings


 
 
 

 

M.S.Amarnath has ‘created’ a set of images which ‘seems’ to be paintings. Yet, they can be experienced as the collection of specific ‘acts’. These acts, besides doing other things, refute the ‘notion’ that “painted images should ‘appear on’ blank surfaces”. Consider only this specific act of re-defining a blank surface. The blankness of the virgin surface is made absent as follows:

Flat, coloured brush strokes practically appear on a flat surface as voluminous. The wrinkles or/and the bulge is real due to the opaque enamel rendering. Or it is ‘made to look real’ due to the ‘way’ it is rendered.

The difference in between is vast, yet both co-exist.The size and scale of the images (though not the ‘size’ of the canvas) in Amarnath’s canvases are restricted. It is no coincidence that he lives in a small sized house. Also, as an artist teaching at an architectural institution, he instructs on how to ‘define spaces’ on a given blank sheet. Either way, the ‘lived’, ‘experienced’ and ‘created’ spaces of the artist are intimately co-related.

The squeezed spaces and the refusal of an image as something ‘on’ a surface — tactfully retains our attention only to just what is ‘seen’. the cliched notion of form and content as two different aspects, and the cliche itself — are both arrested!

What we see in Amar’s paintings and what we are supposed to experience might be one and the same. A portrait or landscape, for instance, could be experienced ‘differently’ from the ‘style’ in which they are being re-presented. Pasting ‘readymade’ design-cloth pieces onto the canvas and painting acrylic paint upon them mock at the conventional art historiography of the former logically following the latter. For instance, the ready design patterns of cloth and almost abstract acrylic paint adhere to each other in a particular way. Design seems to be painted and abstract colour patch seem to be ‘pasted’, often, as the map created within them is deceptive to the eye. Does it mean that Amar is indicating us to treat these works as a criticism of the linear process of western art history through visuals (and not words)? Has he deliberately abandoned any conventional subjective involvement that lies between the painted surface and the underlying white canvas, for the same reason?

Amar’s biographical graph of past one decade indicates the urgency for doing so. His not so very popular case of creative protest/criticism of the Baroda-oriented new material artworks as well as their pioneers, in the form of his own new-material work, brought in this self-referential mode into his creativity. This is a paradoxic situation but it indicates the possibility of deleting the ‘spatial gap’ between the pleasure of an image (art) and its ability to comment on the pleasure of another image. There lies the real experiential pleasure of Amarnath’s current works.///