M.G.Doddamani has been painting faces as if they evolved out of a

background, since past two decades. Earlier, his figures and the

background, together, shared a sense of anonymity from almost

everything mundane, as if by design. Now, the faces have dissociated

themselves from where they thought they hailed from. Currently, since

the face value of the portraits is towards addressing the ‘a certain

kind of divine’ and ‘mundane’, the background provides a ‘metaphoric

background’ ( i.e. beyond availing a real one) to that quest.

Dissociating themselves from the faces and other images, they become

self-complete, ‘independent’ entities. Often, the figures support a

statement of the background as well, thus ‘disapproving’ what Norman

Bryson would call as ‘anorexic’—that the background, always, merely

supports the figures, without struggling for an existence of its own.

 

The way Doddamani does it, now, is by invoking a set of re-energized

articulated painterly strokes. He has almost deciphered a kind of

clear cut, pleasant, fluent brownish outlines that could, if they will

, exist ‘on their own’, without progressing towards making a coloured

picture, nor being made out of anything else.*1* Yet the lines gel

with what follows and adheres as ‘coloured’ images within its ‘own’

boundaries. The rendering of colours as well as colours-as-colours,

are (a) two different identities , (b) are both ‘contained’ within the

linear outline’s boundaries in such a manner that they could

dissociate from each other at any intended moments of visual

perception. It is like a sculptor separating the mould from the clay.

The multiple layers of making each canvas co-exist with the

‘appearance’ of their final version. His paintings are analogous to

Vipassana (a Buddhist experience) mode of grasping the world. Our

surrounding is a result of our perception while our perception itself

is a result of the world around us. Reality is defined as ‘relative’

entity, not as the ‘obvious’ one, according to his painterly

preoccupation.

 

There are certain outstanding textures acting as ‘highlights’ on the

body of the painted imagery. They add to the enhanced dimensional feel

of the figures as well as to the stylistic continuation of the

tradition of his kind of figures (observe his work ” My World:…”).

This is a secondary meaning that he avails to those textures. The

textures, in fact, act as a bifurcating agent between the figure from

its background and the background from its own background—the figures!

 

 

(II)

 

Altogether, each of his picture construes a simulacra, a life-like

world made up of elementary facts of both art and life. Yet they can

redefine, break, build and refute their own meanings in a reversed

order at any given moment. His pictures generally withhold this

capacity to get perceptually disintegrate into its basic ingredients:

(a) the boundary-like outlines; (b) the enclosed colour-fields within

and (c) without; (d) the light and murky, dry brush strokes playing

the role of the highlights. All in all they can be read as

independently or as mutually related. It is similar to viewing a human

being next to us through an x-ray glass or/and a microscope and all

such similar apparatus that permits us to peep into our own bodies,

that our bare eyes and culture refutes us in general domestic

circumstances.  Doddamani’s painterly world is always attached with a

prior condition that it can dissolve at any given, intended and

desired moment and that dissolution itself need not be a

reconstruction . Derrida’s erasure, perhaps, might be different from

this kind of satori—a break not in what is perceived but in the very

act of perception itself! The potential to do so is already, always

evident in most of his completed pictures*2*. This ambiguity is the

most certain aspect in his works.

 

It is the audience’s decision to choose which way to look at or how

intensely to look at his creative weaving. And since two opposite

working methodologies are involved –pictorially and perceptually,

there is a pronounced satori-like void and meaningful emptiness at the

heart of each canvas. The pictorial and perceptual cancel each other.

This could be likened to the experience of a movie. The actual vision

is mobile. The factual reality says that certain number of still

frames pass in front of the viewer’s pupil, in quick succession, per

second. Both realities are valid. But reality itself is proven

ambiguous and relative, as well!

 

The experience in these works move in two opposite directions of

framing and unframing consistently. The pictorial aspects in his works

are ’structured’ imagery whose basic building blocks are visible and

vulnerable, intentionally. Doddamani’s figures, have arrived at a

certain sense of ‘aggressive serenity’, after a controlled pictorial

struggle over the years. This is paradoxic. Violence—in the current

age, doesn’t come as a foreign agent but is within and needs to be

violently dealt with culturally. Perhaps a creative violent act

against violence is the only power to suppress the latter, with a long

lasting effect.

 

(III)

 

Consider the way Doddamani paints. The pattern is already

pre-meditated. Yet, the different meaning that the same rendering

acquires in each of his canvas differs and might even contrast. A sign

acquires a deviant meaning. “The Light (that) Choose to Fall Upon

Him/Her” is a set of two works in which the light acquires an

epistemological relevance . The same ‘light’ in “Between Power and

Quest for Life” becomes a catalyst for a holistic purpose of the final

answer/enlightenment. The light, in the light of the Impressionists

definition that ‘ even darkness holds shades of dimmed, refracted

light’, arguably, comes in handy for the main concern for the artist

herein. (a) the ‘light’ and (b) the ‘play of light’ (they are two

different things, if you can closely observe)—search for various

surfaces to play upon. Light and the murky dry-brush strokes that

define the body around Bamiyan Buddha in one of his two

‘installations’ (”Surrendering to the Peace”) is a case for argument.

The painted body around the divine figure is encloses a zambie-like

feel within. It is an abode made up of dead skin, forcefully being

stuffed with the divine image of the dramatic chiaroscuro of the

Bamiyan body. Bodies of different variety and kinds, ‘kind’ and

aggressive, use conventional symbols to redefine their own bodies.

These together re-confirm what the artist is upto—to create a set of

imagery which are constantly in the act of ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ in

the face of violence, as a constant reminder against it. So a crowned

face, a face as a supportive motive for furniture, a face framed

within tiny picture frames — are all faces that ‘face’ multiple

variety of situations with indifferent kind of expressions that seem

plain and deceptively contemplative. Actually the singular divine

expression in all his works is neither singular nor merely divine. It

is the sum total of the  concealment of all kind of resistance to

violent social reactions!

 

The face is in search of light of another variety brought about due to

the play of natural light as ‘highlight’ and spread upon the overall

canvas surface. In the due process, Doddamani evokes meanings to

certain identities (like ‘this is flesh, skin, the toga cloth, the

furniture, lotus etc’.). So what you see (objects) is a gift of the

‘light’ that is imitated by the paint which also ‘creates’ the objects

and treats it as a metaphoric resistance to violence. The light ‘on’

the objects also creates a gap in between itself and the object as if

because peace, light, as such is always a utopian idea and a short

lived resistant-weapon against an all encompassing violent

epistemologic landscape.

 

Thus he assigns dual and/or multiple roles to similar visuals/signs.

Or speaking in a Structuralist manner, it can be said that the meaning

of a sign is constantly subject to change in Doddamani’s works . Not

only the ‘relation’ between the signified and the signifier changes

but the very relation in between is rendered uncertain.

 

The figures appear serene, which is a result of a sort of aggression,

both within and without the aesthetic/artistic premise, even if one

considers the artists background. Serenity itself is no virtue. To be

more precise, the artist desires for serenity, while his struggle for

acquiring it or hoping for its arrival in the near future is what

distinguishes his works from the traditionally identified iconic

images of, say, the Buddhist thoughts. His works aim at serenity but

is a sum total and a record/document of the ‘violent struggle’ and the

‘force’ involved (in the form of artistic discipline), towards

treating it as a goal and drifting towards it!

 

 FOOT NOTES:

 

1. This desire to be ‘on their own’ or ’stay aloof’ are not about

alienation as much as they are autobiographical and intentional. A

quick survey of the artist’s past two decades of art activity makes it

more clear. He functioned as a free lance artist, as a co-ordinator

for a gallery of art and again became   a freelance artist. All these,

together, made him lead a lifestyle that most migrant-artist in

Bangalore tend to adopt, but with a difference. Arguably, while most

of those artists who came to the city decided to stay aloof, on their

own, Doddamani initiated an art community of  sort, facilitation a

urban-rural nexus in the due course, in the history of recent

Karnataka art. His inevitable distancing from his actual semi-rural

upbringing , from art institutionalisation and from the temptation of

social group-reservations indicates that this artist has played

varieties of roles within the art community.

 

 His pictures, in summary, are about such constantly shifting

identities about an artist within an art premise in general and about

the ambiguous identities that he himself acquires, in particular. A

certain sense of internal Diaspora or what we could term as

‘home-away-from-home’ has controlled his (a) creative gestures; and

(b) brush strokes, in order to create those being-on-their-own

‘pictorial signs’. The lonely faces, earlier and the exuberant

independent outlines now—both hold the capacity to operate mutually

independently. While Amitav Ghosh speaks about international Indian

Diaspora which is more verbal and literal, Doddamani’s life style as

an artist personality treats his ‘visual expression’ as a ‘reminder’

of his (and find solace in) semi-rural, economical solitariness, being

celebrated, that too while being only in an urban context. This is

subject to a creative nostalgia as well. ( Read: Amitav Ghosh’s

article “The Indian Diaspora” in “Body.City”, Ed: Indira

Chandrashekar, Tulika publishers).

 

2. Roland Barthes (a) associates the experience of artist Cy Twombly’s

penciled works with that of the experience of a Buddhist Satori . It

means the feel of a ‘jolt’ but not an ‘illumination/enlightenment’;

and (b) Barthes also educates us that Twombly’s attempt to ‘ smudge’,

’scratch’ and ‘lighten’ the conventional process of making strokes

onto canvas/paper works against our usual notion of the process of

‘representation’. Doddamani’s overall rendering technique is similarly

double-edged: one never knows whether the painterly acts (in his

canvases) are acts of removal, of addition or erasures (in Derridian

sense). If the structuring of a Zen Koan can be analogue with these

works: (1) his works rent out space for meditative figures and

recognizable pillars, furnitures and personalities (like Gandhi and

Buddha). They ‘reveal’ the same. At another instance none of the

images described in the previous sentence become evident. (2) They

appear as only a set pattern of pictorial, visual elements applied in

a particular way. (3) At a third instance, all those imagery described

in the sentence before the previous one, becomes visible once again!

(Read: Roland Barthes essay “The World as Art”, book: “Calligram”, Ed:

Norman Bryson, 1988, Cambridge University Press, New York.///