Urban Space, Counter Gaze, all new gallery opening in New Delhi

New Delhi: Life-size canvases with strong figurative forms - whose inherent masculinity filled up the pictorial space with an overpowering sense of physicality - is what artist Shruti Gupta Chandra has been famous for. In her latest solo show titled Counter Gaze, however, she springs a surprise with a marked turn in her oeuvre.  The scale of her work remains the same – some works as large as 6 feet by 5 feet –  and so does the ideology of articulating her concern about human life within fast growing urban spaces but now this political/gender critique appears in subtle tones. To achieve this effect, she has moved away from her earlier indulgence with the homo-centric figurative language and explores a far more abstract pictorial language full of grids and staircases.

 The show is being presented as the launch show of a new art gallery in Delhi - Gallery Artspeaks India - and will be held at Galerie Romain Roland, Alliance Francaise from September 29 till October 6, 2011 after which it will continue at Gallery Artspeaks India, 5, New Delhi from October 11 till October 31, 2011.: www.artspeaksindia.com

  Says Ashwini Pai Bahadur, Director, Artspeaks India: “For the last decade or so I have been an admirer of Shruti’s paintings through several avatars as collector, buyer, admirer and critic and hence it was the natural choice to host her solo show for the gallery’s launch exhibition. Her non conformist subjects and technical brilliance make the same urban jungle where we have both met an endearing piece of art.”

 Says Shruti Gupta Chandra: “While it is obvious that urbanisation is undertaken for the welfare of human beings, we also can’t doubt that it often contributes to their suffering. It is this irony of human existence that I have tired to capture in my work.”

 One person divides into many. One individual gets fragmented and develops - as curator Johny M.L puts it - a ‘mutiplicity’ in this complex/ed urban society. The dichotomy arises when this same individual living in this teeming metropolis is nevertheless, alone. Faced with his aloneness and the rapid breakdown of relationships that are life giving, he searches for sustenance. Added to this is the strange amalgam of the old and new- the erosion of all that one held sacred- values, principles, ideals- by the invasion of a brittle brightness. We build ‘castles in the air’, ‘we hope to find’, ‘we wait, we believe’… But despite all this, he is not just a victim. He has an inner intrinsic strength that enables him to cope and sustain, and also hope.

 Hence, urban spaces, their importance as an aspirational desire, the human angst they create and the fact that they are slowly but aggressively taking over rural spaces is what forms the core of Shruti’s work. In a large-sized acrylic on canvas (40x70 inches) titled, I Hope To Find, she acknowledges, through symbolism of staircases, that this intrusion is changing the rural landscape, affecting their climatic balance and even rewriting their history.

In another work, made up of four panels of 40 inches each, titled Castles in the Air, the flight of stairs seems to take the climber into ideal space; an ideally transformed urban space where everyone is given equal rights and justice.

 Says curator Johny M.L: “This image of a flight of spiral stairs appears in four different frames that constitute a single work, and in each frame the stairs show a different possibility of movement. For a viewer it is almost like looking at the same scene from different physical distances. The artist plays up a virtual zooming for aesthetic reasons and the twist is rendered when in one of the frames she abstracts the flights into a stream of paper like filings.”

 This imagery of stairs, in fact, sets the tone of her latest series of works.  In one of her diptychs, titled I Tried to Climb Yesterday, Shruti directly deals with the histories of a new urban space as set against the backdrop of an old urban space. A honeycomb-like architectural space is depicted to suggest the history of an old city within which the new city takes shape in the form of a pair of sophisticated stairs. Shruti does not tell the viewers where the stairs are leading them to. Instead, she gives certain visual clues where the tension and the lethargy of the human beings felt and experienced in such spaces are suggested through the images of a sleeping dog and a hand that tugs at a string stretched on the right top edge of the painting. The depiction of two principles, the active and the passive ones embodies the character of the two cities; the old and the new. And the painting has the capability of hinting at the possible tensions resulted out of such interfacing.

 What is also visually arresting in this new body of work is how the artist has used ‘grids’ to deconstruct existing realities. Unlike in her earlier works, she builds a lot of grids on her pictorial space so that a viewer can negotiate her reality in both an aesthetic and philosophical way. In works such as Towards And Away and The Folds Opened Out, these grids, almost having the serenity of a gauche on paper or linen, could be interpreted as the abstract representations of the urban-scapes.

 Says Johny M.L: “Grids create a filter and ground of moderation through which the realities could be negotiated, captured and re-constructed in novel fashions. Artists of the post-modern times have effectively used the possibilities of grids, both virtual and real ones, in their works. The apparent haziness or the presence of a transparent veil like coat over these works in fact provides a general ‘grid space’ to them even when the artist does not consciously create grids of negotiation in geometrical shapes.”

 One can find Shruti’s involvement with the beauty of the human body in most of these works too, although considerably moderated and muted. While she has chosen to now create visual planes of abstract color schemes, she incorporates solidly drawn male human figures but distorted to some extent to emphasize the feeling of dislocation of these human beings.

 Wherever Shruti has used human figures, they are depicted as thoughtful beings (Alter Ego, As The World Spun) which represents the dizziness of those caught in the dynamics of urbanisation.

 In another painting titled Yesterday Unravels, Today Engulfs, she creates this movement in the form of a trapeze net or huge mosquito net tied within a historical architecture that represents the old and sustainable urbanization projects. In this net, human beings are seen as if they were washed away by a gushing stream; a metaphor for the dynamics of history.

 In I SEE, I WAIT, I BELIEVE, she uses the human figure as an isolated being within a complex landscape of grids, to depict the fact that one is alone in a very special way in urban life.

 Johny M.L sums up: “Shruti interestingly evades the idea of ‘femininity’ in her works. Though, she is not a feminist in strict terms, through a very clever aesthetic ploy she sends counter gazes at a male dominated society by depicting a lot of male nude bodies in her works. Though she portrays predominantly male nudes and suggestive androgynous bodies occasionally blurring the societal divides in a very clever way, she imparts even a sort of strong musculature to them. This counter gaze comes from her academic training as an artist. However, this gaze shows the contained but carefully cultivated gender politics of the artist. Shruti is not into sloganeering. But her works negotiate the urban spaces aesthetically and counters the male ideology on a level playing field of aesthetic expressions.”