The Human Animal

With or without the knowledge of genetic science and theories of evolution, we cannot but experience deep, if complex and unresolved, bonds with other species of this planet. There is both affirmative pleasure and discomfort in our proximity and kinship with animals, a need for connecting and for avoidance. On the physically immediate and the intuitively emotive plane as well as through questioning, comparison or rejection we acknowledge and face as well as deny the simultaneity of being similar and different beings in a once common and now still permeable habitat. This very duality contributes substantially to the root of spontaneous, symbolic and metaphoric imageries that express our condition in the world. The oscillating relationship between the natural and the cultivated, which as such has its certainties and contradictions, underlies it and feeds it in the ever metamorphosing existential circumstances and the permutation of concepts and aesthetics that echo and respond to those. We keep discovering aspects of ourselves in other creatures and impose on them our own characteristics including those assumed to be representing people who are unlike us and sides of our own personality we feel uneasy about. Especially in a country where things happen unwrapped in the open, and where operates a whole palimpsest of realities still largely continuing a range of time layers, this entangled interaction becomes evident in its raw, basic manifestations that are, nonetheless, capable of yielding subtlety. Adding personal likings and idiosyncrasies, there may be as many ways of understanding and interpreting the fauna within its rich diversity as there are human types and ways of feeling and thinking.

Our view of it remains always contradictory and complementary. On the one hand, we tend to associate animals with naturalness and appreciate their vivacity, beauty, needs, impulses and emotions for their arising without artifice and without an intention to harm others. On the other hand, we see the same through the filter of our cultured, conscious habits and through the habitual social behaviour and acquired notions. We relish the brilliance of a kingfisher’s feathers and feel distaste at the sight of a rough, if in fact rather majestic, flesh-eating kite. We respond with warmth to the loyal affection of dogs, but we also abhor their rough, dirty ways. We can recognise the joy of singing birds, although they primarily communicate, and call it music while many a musical composition alludes to their sounds. Particular instances from the bestiary may be adopted as emblems of freedom, sensuality and grace but also of violence, dominance and brutishness. Thus, throughout, tenderness mingles here with anxiety and dread, awe with loathing, idealisation with ridicule, the condition of prey with that of the predator… We take animals for examples of true simplicity as well as for mirrors of our own craftiness. Perhaps nearly as composite as us, they only reveal their traits more overtly and clearly than us, so becoming effective as elements of the aesthetic language.

In reality a multitude of strata within such aspects, perceptions and formulations-expressions live partly alien but mostly overlap or blend. In the wilderness creatures live according to its laws. Its phenomena seep into village existence where the farmer’s work is conducted together with tamed animals and primeval processes. Tribal, rustic, classic and popular urban icons of gods carry echoes of archaic, pantheistic and animalistic, beginnings of religion. The canons of iconography at the same time pay homage to animal power and its capacity for sustenance, confess fascination, gratitude and fear, as well as transpose its literal images into companions, embodiments and symbols of evolved anthropomorphic deities. A literally and metaphorically hybrid construct of it has a profoundly ingrained place in the re-enactments of human-divine-animal impersonations in traditional theatre and ritual. Secular inventiveness partakes of the same and similar sources for inspiration. The trope of the hybrid serves then two opposite ends that complete one another: the process of identification with positive traits informing people and beasts and of suppression or segregation of our dark sides that become blamed on our uncouth cousins. Back to the actual, big cities not quite perfectly protect themselves from the messiness and dangers of the wild, and yet long for its innocent spontaneity, so buildings become homes for pets, while zoos collect specimens for delight, fun and observation, whereas free but desperate birds and beasts stray among the concrete in search for food and shelter, and cockroaches are sometimes accepted with resignation or negligence and sometimes exterminated with disgust. Mythological episodes and old fables that abound with human protagonists in beastly garb are for ever being retold by grandmothers to alternate now with the animal characters inhabiting contemporary children’s stories and animated films. Whilst early memories carry on to adulthood, those get later overlaid with images from other, less familiar countries, cultures and eras.

Modern and contemporary art is replete with animal figures as any art is, its forms changing with the times. The nation-building period of optimism brought strong, lucid, fairly uniform images with a universal address. Be those graceful, loving animals of Jamini Roy, softly stylised in their rustic simplicity, Tyeb Mehta’s minimalist, abstracted split bull of suffering or M.F. Husain’s horses and elephants exuding sensuous, exuberant energy, their impact was like of regularly recurring emblems over a vast, unified message and form, always general and even in tragedy idealised in a manner. Departures from the paradigm began with the more intense, personal visions of the all-embracing sensual exuberance in K.G. Subramanyan, its humorous variant in Amit Ambalal, with the hybrid visualisations of Chander Seker’s brutally lustful human apes or with Laxma Goud’s unbridled, robustly erotic bodies interchanging their identity with plants, goats and curs. The much more complicated and frequently less hopeful current-day circumstances, along with the growing economy and sophistication as well as with the evident avarice, power struggle, social and gender inequalities and divisions, with regional and individual interests, reverberate in the artists’ taking positions of greater and bolder subjectivity towards their realities that are approached in their local specificity, in its fragments or apparently inconspicuous objects, in the concrete physicality of the ordinary or industrial materials belonging there in order to, through contemporary means that bridge, mix and go beyond classic media, strive to approximate the structure and behaviour of the surroundings and from the relatively particular to expand into a broader perspective on what is essentially human. The artists in this exhibition, some older in comparison to others and some very young, share such disposition under many different thematic and aesthetic foci – from social criticism to conjuring sheer atmosphere, from painting and sculpture to their becoming assemblages and installations. Scorching or humorous in tone, grave and ominous or joyous and lyrical, brutal or serene and warm, their responses are founded on passionate concern as much for people as for their animal companions or alter egos.

One cannot just look at Debanjan Roy’s animals, getting instantly pulled by the raw immediacy of their bodies in the midst of the event in its unfolding. Caught in a forceful, jerky-continuous animation, the dogs are playfully enacting a fierce attack, their toothy crocodile muzzles opening to bite but laughing, even though the possibility of the scare game turning real lurches underneath. Induced to walk around the figures, the spectator experiences the coarse carnality of moving together with them on the ground to gradually recognise that some of this sensation is embedded in the image of the man seated at his toilet who is watching the group. The unadorned, brimming vitality here strikes with its brutal directness accommodating, nevertheless, softer tones in an evocation of instinctual drives within the live pulse. The creatures set in their physicality are all the time turning to and touching, invading each other as well as laying themselves open. Their frolicsome exuberance contains a readiness for open, harsh sex. The rough hewn, shallow-scooped wood moulds and assembles angular volumes that are supple and whole, arching with pleasurable tautness, and yet appear to have been loosely pieced together of separate torsos and legs. The restlessness of the animals enables their alert reactions to the sudden chances that may hide within the tumult. The surface handling that remembers the substance of tree trunks has appropriated also the feel and texture of the fleshy-smooth human skin, while a sporadic canine limb or chest is acquiring traits of male anatomy. Violent fun and venereal instincts bind both worlds, plainly evident in the canines and reflected in the barely suppressed currents passing through the figure of the man -simultaneously tight and lax, rigid and sensual, uncouth and mildly amusing. Thus, the human and beastly temper is seen as inherently alike and participating in the crude but essential energy that sustains life on its basic level.

For dogs that live around people, spontaneity in metropolitan circumstances may be easier. Wild beings, however, wonder off amid unfamiliar jungles of cement, steel and glass searching for scarce food, otherwise get trapped by sudden intrusions of cities into once their exclusive domain and must be experiencing confusion, distress and danger. Jagannath Panda not only empathises with the birds, fishes, monkeys and ruminating creatures lost in the haphazard and perilous structures that generate giddy, disturbing perspectives, but extends the metaphor of their fate to bear on our own in an environment that we share along with its social contrasts, injustices and irreconcilable ingredients of the disarray. With an arduous nostalgia, the artist approaches the iridescent splendour of peacocks, regal yet bewildered against the crudeness of unfinished construction where acute, tangled wires rise up to mock sinuous bushes. He sees black crows as portents and victims of the ravaging urban expansion. Disappointment and apprehension make him wholeheartedly turn to his animals in praise of their grace and ability to survive instinctively and with joy. He does admit that they cannot carry on untouched by civilisation, have to adjust and transfigure. Still, under the new skin of fibre-glass and cloth, he lets them preserve a pristine simplicity of living to live. His resting goat sits there full of sensual charm and abundant maternal curves, rather in tune with the traditional perception of female beauty – innocently voluptuous as a lover and mother. The artist would want to picture it against its lush and unspoilt habitat, but realises that this may be accessible only to the imagination aided by the moods of classic or folk art. Hence, the rhythm of the stylised foliage designs on the animal’s fur reverberates of a vast, sustaining one, as the pollen-laden branches spiral and scatter dotted pathways towards the breath of the sketchily brushed herd at leisure.

Familiarity with the raw urges of the other creatures does not have to prevent intuiting in them the fine emotions and perceptions we cultivate for our own happiness. Gurusiddappa G.E. looks at the animated, lustful sport among the dogs of his locality like he looks at the dalliance of his human neighbours. What he finds is vigorous, sensual and unrestrained, but also full of magical charm. He is an adult who has not had enough time to forget his own childhood and who has consciously retained the child in him while rediscovering it in his and other children. The veil of fantasy that accepts and transforms direct reality has imbibed the atmosphere around literary inspirations, again merging young and mature sources. The many ingredients mix lightly, quite in the manner in which the painter arranges his motifs in a heaving balance between the mirror image and symmetry, stirred as well as held together by an emphatic, inner chiaroscuro that conjures as though ample, voluptuously plastic facets. The bodies of night dogs in rut and of human lovers are treated with a kind of mildly realistic essentialism that verges on portraiture but whose detailed precision enables the artist to grasp enchanting delicacy. The partaking in both species of the same pan-natural eroticism brings tenderness in loving the body and spirit and generating new life, new feelings and flights of lyricism. The joyful, innocently naughty spontaneity of the amorous play between the human and animal couples becomes framed into the artifice of an acrobatic pyramid and a neatly juxtaposed and harmonised aesthetic design to be relieved by the dreamy phantasmagoria of an immense, brilliant blossom and an equally luminous naked bulb, as the pristine and urban contexts cohabit amicably against the encompassing endless space of the star-studded sky. Reinvigorated after the summer’s first rain, all beings recover their contentment and stamina in an obvious as well as poetic symbiosis.

From a somewhat akin position, from keen, indulgent observation of the middle-class urban environment and recollections of a more rustic childhood replete with animal and epic stories combined with a penchant for literature and real-life anecdotes, there comes another vintage position on the proximity of people and creatures. It is a pun-loaded, witty musing about the equations of naturalness and cultivated sophistication. B.M. Kamath takes a kindly humorous glance at the pretences and pomposity lurching in the shallowness of claims to profound knowledge and refined habits or involvement in weighty issues that people display at formal social occasions. He does not judge or denounce such follies, instead allowing cats, rabbits and curs show their indifference and disdain. There is a reverberation of thought traversing the memory space structured by the flow of classic miniatures in how the artist goads the carefully, softly delineated shapes to scatter over the flat, smooth expanse behind only to bounce off each other and interact. The title clarifies the mischievous illustrations of the not entirely self-explaining clues. The painting on a discussion over a vegetarian dinner sets the stage by endowing the rich drapes with dark cast shadows. The so enhanced artificiality of the serious, if half-digested, topics – spiritual or literary, represented on each table becomes plainly ignored or casually upset by the playful creatures, while an elegant, golden cur in three-dimensions is pissing on the painted books. The artist evidently empathises with these protagonists but retains some of the indulgency for the humans. The characters of this modern-day fable tread a delectably hazy borderline between the actual and the fantastic, the realism of their execution being reigned in by a dainty simplification towards the effect of a light-hearted but meaningful signage immersed in the concrete of the tale that is, however, diffusing in the open-endedness of its subversive, muted lyricism.

Despite or because of inhabiting urban conglomerations, we revert to the feel of the fairy-tale and early encounters with the wilderness. The fresh intensity of those days is still in us even if fragmented, suppressed and superseded by the man-made environ. The female disposition may be of a greater propensity for attuning itself to and emotionally identifying with such layers of memory that hold innocent recognitions of rudimentary things as a yet un-segregated part of itself. In the paintings of Shruti Sharadchandra Nelson images of young, beautiful women, through whom one is able to intuit the artist’s presence, drift on the verge between observing free, feral animals and bodily as well as emotively joining them. She can be trusted for her genuineness, since she studied biology and zoology before art. Like the girls, the deer and birds in her works have a clear identity but at the same time transpose into graphic, abstracted signs of their nature and of fantasy. The compositions rely on a loose, linear mesh that compares human figures to wild ones and lets them permeate. On the one hand, its intricacy indicates an unsolvable jigsaw puzzle, on the other, it displays a charming similarity. The delicately overlapping strata of light, translucent hues and fluid, continuous strokes oscillate from an akin but individual lucidity to misty togetherness. There are faces there that open themselves to the sensation around animals as though receiving them within. Feminine silhouettes imitate the shapely, stirring creatures, literally and in their mood, absorbing them while also revealing themselves in it. The gentle beasts move together in rows, entangle and infiltrate one another as well as the girls in a web of motion trajectories. Everything seems to be slowly shifting over the foreground flatness to unveil speed and expansive recess along with their impact on the tender human frame. Touches of gold and silver accentuate the preciousness of the fleeting state.

A woman may be also predisposed to speak of sexual violence in a flesh-bound and metaphorically oblique exposition of the relationship between the genders as one between the prey and predator. Mithu Sen challenges the female condition on the gut level of the literal and literary, ripped, exposed, appropriated by her own body and driven to the caricatured extreme, then thrown in the face of the offender. Over a multitude of images that illustrate, suggest, symbolise, pun, metamorphose, hide and reveal things, including herself there arises a physical-emotive communion with the animalistic.  The artist can make her drawing line transpose into a bleeding vein of nerves and her diaphanous water colour into a stain of carnal torment. With impassioned anger and revulsion, she fills sentimental roses with the pain of violation, derides the human bull-ogre in his unbridled erotic drive for selfish domination and compares his mate to a fish caught on a hook, the intensity of her disgust debunking the patriarchal deification of her pain and subjugation. Experiencing hurt, though, cannot be separated from desire, pleasure and fascination, whereas the aggressiveness of the man-beast seeps into the woman who, nonetheless, lends him some of her affection. Thus, the artist relents somewhat and finds them both transpose into hybrid beings with human heads and amusingly luxuriant serpentine figures. An intestinal, animalistic physicality of it dominates, or least enters, her way with the material, whether it is hair, images of frogs and lizards or long, meandering garlands of innards or limbs in smooth, sensuous satin erotically oiled by slow, unclean digestive processes. The traces of fragile morbidity here become offset by the warm realness of the fake fur framing the drawings. Within the drastic loudness there lies dormant an awkward longing for tenderness, some restfulness and poetry, a possibility to approximate oneness immersed in the primeval act that splits unity and yet binds separateness.

If aching rage abates, a woman embracing her belonging to the organic matrix with all other beings can achieve a sated, peaceful anchoring that welcomes the accompanying pain. Shanthi Swaroopini has been quietly, with a keenly sensitive pleasure, probing her nude frame, readying it for this pan-organic unification. Kinship of the spirit and the flesh has brought about hybrid but intrinsically blended metamorphoses. Half-bird, half-snail or half-lizard, she is flying on the earth and arching to creep slowly or dart with sudden alarm. Protecting her vulnerability and that of the kindred creatures, she relishes sharing with them the lithe, sun-roughened skin under which there swell the tides of birthing, dying and renewing life. Now, she fully enters the image to honour the maternal offering that nature performs in her body. The large sculpture is a kneeling female figure, her palms planted firmly on the ground. Her mounting a high pedestal and the many ample breasts whose form gradually acquires animal qualities alludes to the Roman monument erected in commemoration of the she-wolf, the mother of the human heroes who founded of the city. In contrast with the earlier works that appropriate strong, occasionally coarse characteristics of beasts, this statuesque, beautiful and poised figure seems to suffuse the originally animal representation with a wholesome, nearly complete humanity. Its realism comes close to portraiture but furthers the sense of the essential in the youthfully ripe sensuousness with modesty and joy given to generation and the suffering latent within. Her lush skin combines the carnal smoothness of fibre-glass with the solemnity of bronze. Its texture ripples under the soft strands of wolf fur reverberating in the matted hair like that of holy ascetics. The face of a mortal woman in empathy has finely contoured, almost stylised eyes that lend her the aura of a Madonna epitomising the sacredness of all life-giving forces.

On the many stages in the imagining of the sacred, extraordinary powers and properties find their language of expression by combining human, animalistic and organic motifs, where archaic representations of the divine animal in its earthly shape remain as ingrained and its anthropomorphic, symbolic, allegorical and philosophical sublimations. Its fluctuating, often hybrid metamorphoses continuously depart from and return to both planes. The bull is worshipped in its natural appearance and as the vehicle of Shiva, while the solar lion of fertile might gives its face to Narasimha. The venerated but feared potency of fierce beasts may not be as close to the mortal heart as the mischievous simplicity of monkeys that are more accessible thanks to their resemblance to people. Thus, Hanuman and the epic apian warriors have been among the most beloved icons of this country. Champa Sharath has worked around several verses from Tulsidas’s ”Hanuman Chalisa”, its hero being the most human-like embodiment of strength, guardianship, loyal dedication and bravery, of trust, compassion and purity of feelings. For the artist Hanuman’s naivety and his faltering within the chastity of his mind, his graciously verbatim convictions and deeds reflect the best of what we can be. She conveys this in her woodcuts by imbuing the sketchy straightforwardness of the realistic depiction with traits of popular art of different provenance but akin ethos – early 20th century prints, contemporary book or religious comic illustrations and street signboards. Elements of academic plasticity mingle with a firm, pliant contour and central highlighting that carry echoes of the classical indigenous canon, whilst the hatched modelling hesitates between volume and a folk-popular flatness. The monkey faces humanise on anthropomorphic bodies, whereas the physical prowess of men resembles that of animals. Hanuman fighting the snake ogre hints that he has become man-like for our deliverance from the threatening part of beastliness.

Whether it is mythology and its iconographic canons, phantasmagoria or sheer reality, the pervasive interconnection between us and them is never quite clear. We grant animals that violence for survival merely follows a natural, inescapable necessity in the wild, and we appreciate that fact that feral beasts do not kill beyond their need. We try to transfer this pattern to the human necessities of feeding oneself and one’s own, of practicality and productiveness in clothing or shelter and of the less definable and justifiable areas, like immediate and long-term danger, belligerence and accessories of status, ego and social glory. Aku’s sculptures hit the spectator straight on, but withhold an easy statement or division of the human from the animal, even categorisation of view angles. Instead, they appear to pose questions about the ratio between the unavoidable and excessive violence between the species and suggest its blurred or interchangeable status under contradictions. A prosaically, perhaps brutally, matter-of-fact ram, rough, erect, macho and self-assured in his pride, has donned a massive overcoat made of his own leather. Fleshy thick and stiff, it almost makes him a murky, cocky statue in veneration of the stout, pot-bellied patriarchal male. The surface of the leather alludes somewhat to human skin, but its shape induces a recollection of slaughter houses where rows of animal carcasses hang from hooks, still containing a memory of life, motion and blood, their listless rigour, though, making them raw material for human consumption. Savagery is implied as much by the hardness of the material as by the coarse tailor’s stitches. There is more gravity than irony in the image that seems to be asking: Who is more beastly here? You have to kill me, but do you need to wear me as a garment of status? On a slightly lighter, perhaps just more poetic, note, the leather octopus or medusa is transforming into a mammal’s udder as well as hand in a glove.

Around a similar ambivalence triggered by the substance and its associations, the perspective of Shanthamani M. is one of a woman but a woman who boldly takes on the rawness of things and of issues. Emphasising the rough physicality of paper pulp, industrial pigments and plaster casts from gesturing hands, she has voiced her distress about the wounding of the environment and urban spaces intruded into by ruthless businesses and reckless building, about emotions shaped by labour and daily conversations, about people becoming objectified in social interactions and perceptions. Her sympathy for the grass-root dimension of human life has seeped into the way the artist approaches the material obtained from animals and links both worlds, even if her main intention is to deal with a social phenomenon. The present works centre round the found objects in the shape of ready goat skins available in the market for the use by the fashion industry. The symmetrically stretched skin, cut, simplified and somewhat smoothened, resembles a female torso with stumps for arms and legs. At the same time, its form retains both the connotation of the trophy and of the once live animal behind it. In forceful, tenacious strokes over the hard leather that sensuously gives in under their impact, the artist has resurrected its backbone – a residue of plaint strength and inflicted pain still visible and uncannily obscure in its reference to the human and animal experience. The counterpart to this bodily embedded piece shifts attention to the craft intricacies of feminine clothes. The bones subdue now overlaid by the embroidered intricacies and glistening threads to be remembered in the duress of the needle, stitches and riveting, in the exuberance of the blood-red colour. Although the work’s suggestiveness is directed towards the dead-object transposition of the dressed up female, once again as an after-thought, the edge between the victim and the victimiser-owner becomes fuzzy.

Our link with the animal world carries a bewildering and overwhelming simultaneity of permutations. Its premonition in things blatantly carnal as well as phantasmagorical and poetic fills the imagery of Viraj Naik. Having watched people motivated by primordial, bodily, self-centred desires, he pictures them as animalistic males composed from an entire palimpsest of beasts equipped with properties similar to human as well as mythical and fabulous ones. A conjurer of kaleidoscopically fluid hybrids in animation, captured unawares during the process of an ever proceeding mutation, his ‘nomads’ are perpetually traversing and transgressing the regions of the unbridled wild and of social humanity displaying itself in all its stark assertiveness. He construes them with the help of the moods and metaphoric devices of mythology, fables and iconography. The artist does not quote his sources, rather retaining and enhancing the propensity for metamorphosis that imbues the fecund promiscuity of Greek gods and the directly hybrid state of their Indian counterparts. He attributes its validity as much to our organic rooting as to daily behaviour. Loaded, immediate presence of such fleshy creatures mediates their acute but lyrical strangeness, repulsiveness permeated by indulgent pleasure and at least tries to accept them with amusement and sarcasm. His men are equipped with the faces of birds of shrewd eyes and greedy beaks, of silly, venal lions and massive, brutish bulls. Their many limbs evolve into heads and legs of animals and many prominent penises. Heavily set, assertive and brutish, one cannot tell whether it is men becoming beasts or animals turning human. As naturally and loosely they absorb pedestrian and violent objects from the ‘civilised’ surroundings to again mystify their character, for instance, a rifle becoming a crutch. The graphic-volumetric precision of the pencil creates an oppressive, grounded feel, one nevertheless not devoid of a gauche yearning to soar, its hallucinatory tempo vibrating in the expanses of hatching over the skies and grasses.

From a largely common, if exclusively Hindu, repertoire of hybrid beings and weighty erotic tension, Gopi Krishna conjures an equally intense vision with a different poetic licence. He proves to be much more of a story-teller and his means are very explicit both in the personal interpretation of mythical archetypes and in the clarity of the metaphoric categorisation among his divinities, humans, beasts and plants that obey the roles traditionally ascribed to the genders and their place in the pan-natural sexuality that cannot be separated from fertility and the cyclical interdependence of living and dying for the sake of the world’s sustenance. Sexual desire and birth-giving manifest themselves as other sides of killing and devouring, the process being overseen by wondrously robust god-animals. The artist’s fables are related in an utter painterly manner, both frolicsome and solemn against a well defined lyrical landscape that blends the colours of bodily arousal with the sublime translucent of a glowing dawn. Thus, when he depicts a she-wolf feeding both cubs and a human child, he makes sure that it is accompanied by a beast fully engrossed in ripping open the innards of another creature. The comparatively calm sensuality of the scene on the canvas underscores the normalcy in the recurrence of this duality on the social plane and in the wilderness. The water colours offer as though a moving frieze with epitomes of the forces of life. They teem with images of mythic and essentially human characters that, without there being a rift or a clue to their contemporariness, stay timeless – ancient and of today. Birds and bird-women seem to desire men more that men want them and busy themselves with laying eggs. The mature males, restful in their potency recline in waters among phallic boulders that wrinkle like tender skin and equally erect trees. An incarnation of the svayambhu linga emerges in the shape of a three-headed snake adorned with gem-studded crowns.

Dense, multifarious heritages lay dormant behind the radically simple and abstracted gesture of Jehangir Jani which has directed into the state of the subconscious, feeling mind all the not quite settled contrasts and affinities, discomforts and pleasures that underlie the animal part of man. A rudimentary human head repeats throughout the more realistically rendered diversity of beastly ‘metamorphoses’ that are put on it like a hat or, more frequently, in the way of a carnival mask. The opulence of the golden shine on the refined severity of the bell-metal and bronze foil may emphasise graceful animation in the goat-man as well as eerie bawdiness in the man-bear. The dual components of the masquerade become revealed in opposition and in their permeability or complementary nature. The classic, almost iconic tone of stasis becomes undermined by the accents of amusing cheapness that stirs over the excessively fine finish, while the dominant elegance slowly unravels disquiet and doubt. The civilised artifice of the animal disguise barely covers the real undercurrent of feral turbulence, sexual urges and aggressiveness that are ordinarily suppressed but periodically allowed a safety valve in the form of ritual and social revelries. Because the representation-symbolism-suggestiveness is minimalist but sensuous and potent in other reverberations, it lets one extend it to the universality of the human condition as hybrid in its attempts to bridge contrary environments, cultures, traits of character and instincts. The life-size heads, as if signs or emblems which are also embodiments, face the spectator on the eye level and stimulate their internalising with an intuition of the artist standing behind. It is a reflective, non-judgemental ubiquity that attunes itself to the perennial battle between the mind and the body, between a gentle disposition and drastic impulses, thought and passion, aspiration and desire, comprehended pain and surrender to pleasure, dignity and humiliation, resilience and vulnerability.

The mask and the hybrid span the folklore of diverse lands, popular theatre and literature for children as well as adults, ancient morality parables and modern socio-political caricature. The human animals of Piyali Ghosh seem to have thoroughly ingested and fused these strata in a visual language of her own, as archaic as it is contemporary in order to, not just touch, but fully exhibit, naughtily exaggerate and laugh at our base desires, follies and hypocrisies, the shameless over-indulgency and the sham role-playing. Her creatures so come through without a seam, as if the synthetic state was innate to them, which they owe to the artist’s vigorous facility with blending several originally contrasting but now mutually enhancing aesthetics, also to the artist being in there. The faces and limbs which are the most expressive, if not quieted expressionistic, in the images are handled with a biting kind of nuanced realism whose twists and turns accommodate animalistic features and the impact of the drives underneath. The brutal but tolerant bawdiness of rustic humour merges with a sophisticated urban lampooning of critical involvement. The marriage is reflected in the formal sourcing and its transformation. The realistic directness with cartoon traits exposes and revolts, critiques then, while cleverly juxtaposing and subverting motifs to make neckties and belts together with tongues and fishes into metamorphoses of the loud, lascivious male organ. Indigenous echoes, from classic miniatures and in particular from Kalighat painting, their ethos rather than descriptive allusions, carry on over the fleshly-coloured, curly contours and the voluptuous central highlighting besides the flat multitudes of tiny, pulsating details of decoration that hold the swollen, raw urge. The anticipation of sexual pleasure and the knowing smile that hardly pretends civility, have nothing to do with romance, their plain physicality equally evident in the men and women surrounded by and turning into dogs and pigs in bathtubs, amid a domestic ordinariness.

If engaged with critical protest against the crude display and exercise of wealth, social and political power, one perhaps needs the uninhibited, simple ribaldry of the rustic, especially that the mightiest rarely attempt sophistication or even try to convincingly project their aims and means as something superior to what those actually are. Rather than refer to folk art with its own profundities and expressive-emotive beauty, Ved Gupta hits back at the reality right on its plane and in its own language by employing popular kitsch in its nouveau riche incarnation of overspill apart from a number of familiar ugly human types that could be called caricatured, had not they been so anyway on streets, at home and in the media, in their businesses and in the business of politics. His deliberate simplicism of form, metaphor and message is dictated by fury and disgust as well as by the realisation of their futility except for the momentary release attained through the ridiculing-accusatory bizarreness of the lampoon. The embodiment of all vices here is the middle-aged gnome, self-satisfied having accumulated material assets and a position proportionate to his bulky frame. His meaty, sagging cheeks bear an admiring grin of satiation and greed for more, of an overt, shrewd sleekness that blends the ability to manipulate and compel with the knowledge that he will always succeed. The man lovingly hugs a huge frog to his fat chest, maybe a fashionable symbol of prosperity, that otherwise is normally bound to evince repulsion. The similarity of their features cannot be missed. The corporate-businessman-politician has other emblems or alter egos. The immense, puffy sofa armchair is a well-guarded seat of comfort, authority and self-importance. The garishness of its synthetic crimson spreads its deceptive, opulent allure over rapacious violence. Another avatar, the patchy black and white dog, appears to be exchanging hues with the sofa, like his owner, ready to adapt his ideological colours to the requirement of gainful circumstances.

Aware of the extremities in social inequality, cruelty, vulgarity and violence, Sumedh Rajendran approaches the human condition from the bottom of the hierarchy and in general, though complex, terms. He picks up shabby, banal materials that structure the chaos of the urban street, and in an almost minimalist manner pares them down until they yield their inherently contradictory meaning. With a metaphoric and muted, expressive logic that uncovers a tight system over its shifting shapes and intuitions, he cuts out and assembles a sort of seedy and sad but loving monument to our hopelessness. One can sense that the figure of the man is walking along city buildings, a modest office goer with a briefcase, middle-aged, pot-bellied and stooping with stomach discomfort. The silhouette is outlined in white bathroom tiles that are familiar from public urinals but recall modern temples where sanitary cleanliness stands for religious purity and spirituality. The flat sculpture on the wall witnesses pressure and the man’s meek, matter-of-fact, preparedness in anticipation to give in to it. In a precarious balance of conflicting dynamisms, a wheel tyre seems to be turning in rapid traffic, its steely protuberances pushing the man’s head lower still, while an animal shape is striving to jump out in the opposite direction. One is tempted to see spontaneity and freedom in the beast, maybe also aggressiveness, but its truncated body is arrested half-way. It has been made of cheap tin sheets like the valise of a provincial migrant to the city or like the material used in slum hutments, perhaps holding some belongings, perhaps empty. The human animal with both its conformity and energy gets perpetually drawn into the confusing, ever altering wheel of situations, dislocations, compulsions and manipulations that prevent it from independence as well as from falling apart. Slowly, from within the understatement, there grows an impact of suppressed tension and entrapment.

George Martin’s cats move slowly and sensuously on the elusive areas between childhood and its maturely poetic recollection through the prism of a disturbing reality. Partly figurines of decoration, partly toys, they come alive with the youthful magic that corporally and atmospherically blend the human and the animalistic. Their playfulness, though, has enigmatic, eerie tones with a tinge of the scary. Indicating the beginning of an open, elusive story, they gently and wittily steer adult the viewer to continue it through associations, moods and connections towards disquieting recognitions. Presently, the sculptor continues his employment of alluring substances and colours that shape the consumerist urban sphere and mould its sensibilities, from stainless steel to shiny automobile pigments on idealised skin-smooth fibre-glass. He endows pedestrian objects with a sleek, glamorous charm contrary to what hides inside them, his rubber tyres and metallic aircraft turning cushion-soft, the delicate sparkles of silicon transforming slaughtered animals into tragic fantasy beings. It does take a while, but the image here indirectly, through the irony of its gay lyricism, reveals that we are surrounded by a make-believe world where real oppression and war become gift-wrapped and turned into entertainment and games for us to enjoy the dizzy pace of things swirling and expanding without any remorse because we don’t realise what is happening to others. The sculpture piles a pyramid supported by a fabric-clad airplane, on top of which a bright-coloured man adorned by hallucinatory, circular holograms sits on a pillar of comfortable wheel tyres. With his cat eyes, elongated ears and tail he must be a new-age Satan, his attributes, like always, representing the violent side of human animalism. Against the powerful, if shaky, thrust diagonally upwards, on a spiralling trajectory about to close onto itself two toy airplanes are bound for an annihilating collusion.

The whimsical, bizarre menagerie of Reghunadhan K. is also inspired by the disorienting pandemonium around, populated by organically bonded, though loosely fitted together, human figures and animals amid an over-spill of mundane objects of possession which their carry or which surround and superimpose on them in bewildering, haphazard ways under the garish seductiveness of brilliant hues. People standing on animals or animals treading on things, they are awkwardly mediating a tentative counterpoise never to be attained. With amusement and disgust, the artist watches them eat and disgorge, copulate and go through their routines, always on an energetic but disjointed move. They exist somewhere around the border of the animalistic-like, intensely innate and the performed or pretended. He ridicules them with relish, while they are themselves clowning. Between assumed and hidden faces or gestures and stances, his protagonists enjoy, or more exactly enact for others and for themselves, the thrill of the equilibristic quite in the vein of trained bears or monkeys. This layering of faux elements echoes in their bodies made of painted fibre-glass that to an extent imitates shallow chisel marks on wood and leaves the sham evident. The world is replete with chance meetings of alien realities where nature mingles with artifice, rusticity with assumed sophistication, tradition with the present… All such strata find a not resolved yet firm anchoring in the ingraining of Kerala’s traditional performance art paradigms that adopt new, paradoxical situations. The painted ritual face-mask of the man-animal-deity wears now a latex hood metamorphosing into a balloon-snout, while the theyyam skirt is substituted by a cane table. These sculptures are hybrids assembled of human-like parts and parts of lathe-turned wooden furniture. It is only the stumped angularity of the latter, accentuated by the stiffness of the bodily showmanship that reminds of their animalistic rooting.

Although baffling, crowded imageries inevitably emerge in response to our multifaceted, dually reflective relationship with beasts, sometimes a need for calm reductionism recurs to focus on the core of things with empathy and regard even if it should bode bleakness. Whereas most artists integrate animalistic elements in a primarily human shape, Arunkumar H.G. pays homage first to the bovine species that remains still irreplaceable in our daily necessities and survival strategies, to its physicality and mundane roles in order to then reveal it as an embodied metaphor for the people at the base of life. In fact, through his contradictory but complementary images of the essential cow and bull the artist leads us to experience the fundamental phases in the cycle that nourishes existence. The expansive, white relief opens out and passes in front of the spectator’s eyes like an endlessly undulating, nearly flat landscape of a cow’s body, a body fleshed out by the convexity of its udders but dissolving into a sea of milk and buttery wax. Its affirmative abundance is juxtaposed to its apparent opposite – the cow-dung of excreted waste that normally evinces instinctive repulsion. The scenery in the counterpart panel rises with a rough, immediate tactility, as the surface of the cow’s body becomes the farmer’s generative soil processing the excreta and undigested pieces of straw. The flow of the forms manifesting themselves in a positive and negative reciprocity originates from the same phenomenon. Its inconsistent unity in social and religious terms is contained in the figure of the Nandi bull, moulded of cow-dung with wax, resting on a large, stainless steel dish. Simultaneously an ordinary being and an icon of adoration, it epitomises the labour of the animal and the villager as well as the symbolism of fertility, force and nurturing. The sacred idol thus gains a grave sarcasm as a sign of human slavery, its deification incapable of alleviating the actual bondage.

On the osmotic boundaries of bodily presence and philosophical bemusement, Thomas Kovoor builds a futuristic fable around the dangerous benefits of scientific alchemy. He quotes the incredible aspirations and findings of synthetic biologists aimed at producing a chemical energy gas that would contain the vital pulses of all living beings, link and determine the nerves, organs, brain and emotions, and that with the aid of sophisticated technology and regulated pressure could be used for their improvement and alteration. One cannot but think about the unpredictable consequences of genetic engineering. The ambiguous duality persistent in our sharing the natural environment and habits with animals and in using or manipulating them for our own advancement may be as old as humanity’s history, as it meanders throughout oscillating uncertainly between a state of inborn communion and one of enforced intervention, between harmony and cruelty, divinity and artifice. The sculptor has erected an ardent but horrifying memorial to this mystery. Under the eerie, ominous weight and the firm geometry of the biogas container, he assembles an immense, hybrid entanglement of bodies and laboratory or factory equipment. The heads, torsos and limbs of different beings are engulfed by a fragmented amalgamation with pipes, cauldrons and conduits. At times their realistic or classical sensuousness surfaces in full or turns statuesque with an abstracted serenity, their gentle detail only to be severed abruptly, to develop metallic tentacles and merge with other bodies or the body of the machinery. The feel of luscious, natural unity in the evolving is permeated by one of a harsh, angular fitting under duress and occasional signs of pain and despair. The beings seem to be proceeding in a parade while being sucked into some liquid vortex. They form a jagged stupa-mound, its majestic dome, yet, sinking into hollowness, whereas the supple bronze is acquiring a rigid, industrial glimmer.

Despite the guilt over ecological exploitation, perils and imbalances, we still wish to see ourselves in the splendour and goodness of creatures in the wild. They, too, frequently manage to locate their cosy nooks and spaces in the midst of our denatured habitat which, nonetheless, at least sometimes is maturing into a new kind of naturalness. Likewise, our imagination begins to see these creatures through the film of the changing surroundings. Prithpal Singh Sehdave Ladi invites little, shimmering butterflies to alight in inconspicuous but respite-and-lyricism-granting corners of his sculptures trusting that they will stimulate our fantasy and the desire for freedom. Along with other ever busy bugs they, as if in response, prove to be the only beings capable to appreciate, reciprocate and reflect the self-effacing efforts and kindness of the people who remain unaffected by existential ambiguity, poses, cruelties and compulsions. Of late, the artist has been happily making swarms or ‘families’ of graceful, nocturnal insects with bodies and eyes made from discarded glass and tiny bulbs, old battery parts and faux gemstones, with feelers of filaments who crawl in quiet animation on legs and feelers of slender, shiny metal, their wings sublime and ornate like an elegant lady’s earrings. He calls them ‘our friends’, sometimes lovingly in French. They seem to be fleeting between sheer translucence, luminosity and an aura of hue, between the drawing line shaped by thin wires and a mere hint of plasticity yielding delicately sensuous moods that can be recognised as feminine, manly and even child-like playful. One has to watch them in close proximity, bending towards the floor where they congregate or facing them when they hover in mid-air. With warm respect for the enchantment with which they imbue simple acts of usefulness, one is perhaps returning their homage to our own modest endeavours as displayed by the butterflies and beetles in the artist’s monumental bronzes.

Vinod A. Patel, too, is dedicated to celebrating the ingenious survival of the smallest of creatures among the junkyard of industrial cities where they have adopted by growing smooth, glossy crusts of hard, masculine sheets from the machines of speed and technological tools of production. The sculptor paints them in the bright colours of trendy fast bikes and equips with many quick, probing limbs, eyes and antennae that have the purposeful energy and steady dynamism of spanners and wipers held together by a variety of bulging bosses and screws. With heart-felt admiration and a tinge of cordial humour he has goaded them to increase in size far beyond the original insignificance and ripen with a sort of almost erotic attractiveness and grace that, however, sporadically unravels darker notes of anxiety. Although he is performing such acts of redemption from the menacing shadow of human indifference, he appears to be speaking out his concern for the big and the minute species that are intertwined within the same mutating habitat. In the long perspective both may find themselves equally endangered and need to be cautioned before it is too late. Eventually, the artist decides to deliver a warning directing it at the mightier and much more hazardous of the two. Against the deviant, boxed-in landscape with a heavily sagging sky of sheet-iron and feeble, tubular plants that stoop and cleave above the barren earth, his metallic beetle gets caught in some gaping crevices and frayed debris. A human index finger of gigantic proportions, its skin naturalistically replicating live crease details but singed a dry black, is touching the insect, but we don’t know whether it will lift it and move to safety or crush it without a second thought. Since the finger, too, is beginning to show deep cracks, perhaps the human race will comprehend the necessity to preserve its own continuity by respecting other inhabitants of the planet and admit that they may not be so very different from us.