“Hues in Myriads”- Form and Formless

Recently, Poonampratap hosted an exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures, presenting a collection of 26 renowned artists and India’s top 10 painters like Shamshad Hussain, Alka Raghuvanshi, Sudip Rop and the list continues at Habitat centre.

A reality/illusion that we perceive as a form in a time and space and portray it peppered with our own imagination or do we try to create a world that does not exist in our normal imagination or still do we use the world as it appears as a starting point to depict what is not seen/ is not visible and is felt only as an inner experience?. Do we need the cue of the familiar to arrive at the inner higher reality through art?

Platonic philosophy referred to a unique original of all the existent forms. The Greeks thus focussed more on creating the external forms and their expertise in rendering the perfect human and animal forms or even folds of cloth was marvellous. While in India and China efforts were made to capture the inner dimensions of a Being—human specially. Early Buddhist sculptures even refused to use human form of Buddha suggesting the ethereal can not be captured in a limiting human form.

The idea of limitless, going beyond the form leads one to the search for the formless infinite.

To view the form as totality of all viewing angles was the first step from form to formless. To arrive at the free float of formless not as an opposite of form but as mystical experience one requires looking at the Nirakar (the formless) in Indian philosophy.

So what is the quarrel between form based and formless or abstract art? This is what occupies svelte artist-curator Poonam Pratap Kohli. She has a cross section of artists like Shmshaad Hussain, Kanchan Chander, Vijendra Shaarma, Aradhana and many young faces. She presents artist Nilaudri Paul who floats thin languid acrylic like falling rain from soft monsoon clouds on his canvases. On his canvases appears the colourful cacophony of Meghdootam of Kalidas in which the naika is surrounded by liquid blooming colourful abstractions of space. Sudip Roy another artist who started his art journey in Delhi’s Sridharni gallery with watercolours of bottles reminded me of Italian artist Morandi, has been preoccupied with the long tradition of naika. His work is in consonance with poetics of romanticism going back to sensuousness of Gita Govinda.

Poonam has an alluring simplicity and innocence of expression in her art. She creates an underwater oasis where joy flourishes in free frolicsome gambolling of colour-textured fishes. Her use of light merging tones of crimson, blue and green enhances the softness and charm of underwater universe. Dilip has a ravishingly colourful world full of naively charming men and women while Pratap builds in relief a poetic sensuality of which I have spoken above. The bee-stung full lips, closed eyes like petals of a rose, the aquiline nose are all from the shilp shastra of yore.

Coming to the abstractionists Hem Raj, Alka and Viktor Vijay each have a very private personal expression. Hem Raj had been—right from the time he left College of Art Delhi—exploring the magic of line and thick heaped oily chromes on his vibrant canvases. The exhibition offers a cross section of form and formless expression adding to your aesthetic joy.

-H.S.Communication.