Manu Parekh’s recent paintings are a festival of thrumming organic forms punctuated by powerful images of explosion. Cosmic flowers animate many of his works. Planets spin out along galactic trails. A world-maze unwinds itself to dominate one of his diptychs, and hybrids of flower, bird, lung, kidney, and polyp populate surfaces shimmering with the visual recitation of images that allude to jellyfish, spirillae, spermatozoa or plankton. The paintings that form the present exhibition, which I have titled ‘The Pursuit of Intensity’, have been culled from two evolving series, ‘Chant’ and ‘Flowers from Heaven’, which Parekh has developed between 2004 and 2009.
These splendidly scaled and remarkably detailed paintings mark an unprecedented formal departure from much of Parekh’s earlier work. Their concerns and techniques encode the learning, experimentation and dialogues of a lifetime, but the images themselves are charged with a vigorous desire for transformation and renewal. These works resonate forcefully, in my view, with the Sanskrit term spandana: the originary throbbing of the universe, the seed-burst that marks the birth of matter and time, which Parekh celebrates here as the birth of colour and event.
For all the restless vibrancy attending it, Parekh’s is a deep and considered departure. It marks the most recent manifestation of the pursuit of intensity that has defined his artistic progression for nearly five decades. This pursuit has demanded both a devotion to some as-yet-unmanifest truth that the artist seeks, as well as a dedication to the constant refinement of his practice. The result is a driving purposefulness held in rein by the reflective awareness of a task perhaps never to be finished. This combination of impulses inspires Parekh to an ever more full-bodied exploration of his concerns. It also produces a measure of humility, on his part, before that vast and inexhaustible reservoir of forms and stimuli that is the universe, with which he must engage every day to distil his images.
We would not be overstating the case in suggesting that these recent paintings are in the nature of offerings to the unruly and volatile creative spirit of the universe. Parekh has often spoken of his art under the rubric of chitra-seva: the painting as a rapturous act of worship, a conception that animates the practice of pichchwai painting in the votive elaborations of the Pushti-marga or Vallabha-panthi branch of Vaishnavism. The principal Pushti-marga temple-town of Nathdvara in southern Rajasthan has, accordingly, long been a source of inspiration for the artist. [1]
II.
Born in Ahmedabad in 1939, Parekh belongs to a generation that made a historic and even revolutionary contribution to Indian art between the late 1960s and the late 1970s. He and his contemporaries opened up areas of sensibility and preoccupation that had not previously found favour either with artists or audiences in metropolitan India. Instead of apprenticing themselves to the formal languages of international modernism or subscribing to the Nehruvian project of national modernity, as the generation preceding theirs had, they turned to regionally available experience, to the immediate and intimate, to the contours of locality.
Instead of the abstractionist, surrealist or idealised figurative choices of the Progressives and the Santiniketan circle, these artists focused on human idiosyncrasy, anguish and heroism in the arena of the everyday. They politicised the experience of viewing art by proposing a redirection of viewerly attention to the tragic and violent, the terrifying and potentially disgusting aspects of experience: their art could not be viewed simply as a source of aesthetic pleasure; it provoked the viewer into a knowledge of complicity in the asymmetries of opportunity, entitlement and articulation around which Indian society is built. Yet their images and narratives also held out a militant hope, a stubborn will to survive: their work corresponded accurately to the mood of the Left-liberal urban intelligentsia that had felt betrayed by the collapse of Nehruvian idealism, desired to broaden the ambit of social and political struggle across classes, and was soon to be further alienated from the nation-state by the Emergency.
From this crucible of thought and expression emerged Sudhir Patwardhan’s industrial workers, as vulnerable as they were muscular; Nalini Malani’s survival specialists, whether street performers or women trapped in interiors; Vivan Sundaram’s peasants strapped to haystacks but dreaming of revolution. These artists brought the labouring body to the forefront, rendered in the specificity of its environment: garages, markets, factories, and fields came to mottled and sweat-stained life in their works, no longer symbols of Progress or Local Colour.
Other members of this generation developed a poetics of the ambivalent self, strangely bodied and torn apart by several minds. In Jogen Chowdhury’s paintings, the interplay of desire and decay found incarnation in bodies whose limbs had become knobbly and tuberous. Gieve Patel, physician and painter, meditated on suffering by attending to the maimed, mutilated, diseased and lost individuals who populate such quotidian venues as the street and the railway station. Bhupen Khakhar, across an oeuvre that grew gradually more explicit, exposed the raw concupiscent animal concealed beneath the costume of propriety and the skin of civility. Bikash Bhattacharya presented a gallery of eerie dolls, deceptively childlike, radium-eyed, poised on a disquieting threshold between innocence and sexual awareness. [2]
Within this constellation, Parekh painted organic composites calibrated between ripeness and rottenness, blurring the lines between human, animal, plant and object to produce richly involuted and efflorescent emblems of sexuality. From 1980 onward, also, he became preoccupied with the ubiquity of doubt and the persistence of faith, especially as embodied in that city of paradox which daily balances between light and darkness, physical death and spiritual rebirth, sophisticated ceremonial and urban degradation: Banaras.
Parekh recalls a vividly transformative experience he underwent while on an evening boat ride down the Ganga nearly 30 years ago. As he sailed by, watching the grand phalanx of ghats from Asi to Manikarnika, he found himself merging with the tempo of the city, its fluid orchestration of people, rituals and times of day. Absolute opposites seemed to dissolve into a simultaneity around him in the twilight. He writes: “I wanted immediately to paint everything that I saw, all that was out there: the glow on the river, the silhouetted ghats and temples, the constantly flowing water, the people. As I watched, flowers, too, acquired a special significance for me. I saw a newly married couple with thick garlands of flowers come down to the Ganga to be blessed. Moments later, a dead body covered in similar flowers was carried to the river. In life as in death, the same colours, the same odours.” [3]
III.
Parekh’s studio is a polyphony of chromatic nuances. Yellow is never made available directly, but as a glissade of turmeric, ochre, tangerine. These shade into mellow orange and sienna, darken towards umber. Purple, likewise, is a spectrum of shades: Parekh engages our vision with mauve, damson, violet and jacaranda, which yield to cranberry, scarlet and vermilion. Salmon pink and dove grey contend in some paintings, and green can never be pinned down here, as it darts among sap, leaf, emerald and viridian.
Parekh’s measured use of colour to bypass discursive interpretation, as a key element in his current strategy of abstraction, is in the nature of a meditative tool. The aesthetic experience inevitably calls for an approximation or translation into words. Parekh’s recent paintings resist such interpretation: they generate a deep-welling visuality that points us towards silence and receptiveness. The artist favours iterative devices, layering his paintings as though in mantra upon mantra delivered in pictorial form. He repeats a motif, such as the leaf in block-print format, inspired by the multiple strata of Bodhisattvas whose presence fills and resonates through that locus classicus of Buddhist religious architecture, the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas, whether in the Ajanta cave complex in the mountains of peninsular India or in the Kizil cave complex in China’s Xinjiang region.
Perhaps we could regard these paintings as thangkas for a secular world. Rather than mandalas composed from the strands of contemplation and harmony, they are cosmograms shattered and re-made by vicissitudes. While teasing out the mystery and splendour of this unpredictable universe, they exult in an unrepeatable, sometimes impenetrable plenitude of detail, an astonishing diversity of texture. We find strokes, daubs, stipples, drips, fuzz, spun threads, dribbles here, an entire vocabulary of the application of paint. Parekh delights in giving rival ecritures free play across his pictorial surfaces: the naturalistic flower study is held in counterpoint by the stylised still life, the incontinence of pure gesture competes with the Picasso-style and Baconic biomorphic stylisation of part-human, part-avian, part-vegetal forms.
Parekh is a voluptuary, attentive to the nuances of a sensuous experience that he shares with his viewers through his emphasis on a painterly handling that revels in the haptic, the palpable, and the nearly edible to convey its insights. Parekh’s paintings, lavishly tapestried as they are, cannot be summarised in the simple description of ‘expressionist’, which does little justice to the opulence of his conception and the dynamism of his treatment. The suggestion of a tapestry is not accidental; it has been remarked upon by at least one other writer. Writing about Parekh’s radiantly dark triptych, ‘Holy Water at Banaras’ (2005), the poet and cultural administrator Ashok Vajpeyi observes that the painting “could be viewed as a tapestry in which the absence of human figures is cleverly woven into all that is largely made, inhabited and surrounded by humans.” [4]
We must dwell on the implications of the tapestry as a structuring principle in Parekh’s recent paintings. He articulates intricate embroideries of detail and scale, tracing and outline, definite motif and volatile swirl, as he works up his surface in what is certainly a homage to the spirit of Pollock. Eventually, his frame is neither surface nor depth, but rather, a productively indeterminate field that invites us to shift focal length constantly: it summons forth the reserves of performative viewing instead of submitting to passive consumption.
IV.
In a deliberate escape from the danger of ethnocentrism, and to open himself up to an array of cultural stimulations, Parekh renounced his ancestral Gujarat in the mid-1960s. But a prudence and shrewdness, as well as a love of risk-taking – all quintessentially Gujarati mercantile traits – have long informed his approach. He never wastes anything, neither sensation nor technique, neither overheard conversation nor sought-out instruction, from any period of his life and work. He carries with him the maimed yet prophetic figures that he set against burnished backdrops in the early 1990s, as well as his Banaras works, crafted in layers of veiled light interleaved with incandescent shadow.
Circling back to sources and resources, picking up a line, a melody, a remembered texture, a motif, Parekh generates an archival passion in his recent work. His line and colour burst through decades and even centuries of artistic activity, invoking Nathdvara and Kandinsky, Rajput folios and Action Painting. Among the swirling lyrical and gestural forms, I detect an invocation of a celebrated Basohli image of Krishna drinking up a forest fire, the ring of flames, each flame a leaping tongue, disappearing down his throat like a dragon’s tail. Parekh cites the graffiti-covered wall as a referent for these paintings, too: the walls of Ahmedabad, Calcutta and Mumbai, plastered over with political slogans and lampoon images. But he declares, also, his affinity with the tortured yet magical surfaces, shored up with a private system of runes, masks and phrases, of Jean-Michel Basquiat who destroyed himself with drugs, dying in 1987 aged only 27. [5]
Some of Parekh’s recent paintings could also be read as versions of the still life, that most disdained of academic genres, possibly because it has always been associated with bourgeois taste. In actuality, the still life can boast a pedigree that goes back to the vanitas and the memento mori, pictorial cautionary tales concerning the transitory nature of the world. The still life contains cosmic intimations, and the vases that are dimly discernible in the symphonics of Parekh’s compositions suggest those ancient Indic symbols of fecundity, the kumbha and the purna-ghata. The range of signals that Parekh offers us as he tunes up his paintings may span from the ordinary to the epic: when we look into the pulsating heart of one of his flowers, we look into the heart of a distant star that has blown up and died even as its travelling light dazzles our eyes.
‘Chants’ and ‘Flowers from Heaven’ act as a compressed archive of Parekh’s career as, variously, painter, researcher and design consultant. He revisits, in his mind, the rhythms of the ritual painters of Mithila, with whom he worked after the death of his colleague at the Weavers Service Centre, the gifted and mercurial researcher Bhaskar Kulkarni. He rehearses the cadences of the weavers of the Vichitrapuri saris in Orissa, with whom he discussed permutations of black, white and red as a design consultant to the Handicrafts Handloom Export Corporation of India. Parekh also annotates earlier phases of his own work: the poetics he improvised from a diversity of encounters with roadside shrines, tree shrines, and linga-yoni images; the alternately delicate and robust erotics that informed his evocation of the 19th-century sage Sri Ramakrishna through threads and sequins as well as the sharp residues of ink and charcoal.
Perhaps I should describe Parekh’s world-view as vitalist. The central preoccupation of his art is the mysterious flow of libidinal energy that propels both self and nature. His paintings have always sprung from an intuitive awareness of its tidal patterns, the universal cycle of growth, decay and regeneration that is its vehicle. And while Henri Bergson has long been consigned to the museum of superseded ideas, there may be scope for a judicious retrieval of his conception of the élan vital as a joyous motive force that sustains the universe. Or call it lila, if you will, the play of the gods. In either interpretation, Manu Parekh is an artist who regards the world as the manifestation of a pluriform energy, which must create constantly in order to bear witness to itself.
(Bergen, 16 September 2009 – Mumbai, 28 September 2009)
Notes
1. For a history of the votive painterly tradition of Nathdvara, see Amit Ambalal, Krishna as Shrinathji: Rajasthani Paintings from Nathdvara (New York: Mapin International, 1987; rpt. Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 1995).
2. For an account of the emergence of this generation of artists, in the context of a modern Indian public space mapped by the contestation between illiberal and progressive tendencies, and the changing role and perception of artistic practice within it, see Ranjit Hoskote, ‘In the Public Eye’ (Art India Vol. 5 No. 4, 2000), pp. 28-35.
3. Manu Parekh, Painting the Sacred City (New Delhi: Penguin/ Viking, 2005), p. 9.
4. Ashok Vajpeyi, ‘Eternity Watches Time’, in Manu Parekh: Banaras, Eternity Watches Time (Ahmedabad: Mapin/ Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2007), p. 39.
5. Conversation between the artist and the author (studio visit: New Delhi, 6 September 2009).
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