Wednesday 11 October 2017

Youtube Poster l Solo l Virtual Worldwide Show by Tathi Premchand

His performance is relative and real and ongoing. - Text by Sumeshwar Sharma

TO LIVE TO PAINT TO LIVE
Pisurwo Jitendra Suralkar | Solo
Curated by Niccolò Moscatelli
Clark House Initiative Project Room
Preview: 12th October 2017
6 pm – 9.30 pm
Exhibition continues until 6th November 2017
Open all days from 11am – 7pm, Leaving Mondays.

Looking at Pisurwo’s work, the first thing we notice is the omnipresence of the human face. The more naturalistic works and the portraits, practiced by the artist since the beginning of his career until now - and probably forever - give us the entering point in his world.

His way of engaging with the portrait, which could be wrongfully read as a classical attitude, is very much influenced by the years passed as a street portraitist, by all the constraints and the context of the job: the drawing has to be fast, the result must be resembling and satisfying for the subject/buyer. There is no study of the psychology of the character, no gaze through his mind and soul, just his blank appearance - just Pisurwo’s swift and secure lines. Nothing but pure drawing. And when this manner is freed by those constrains, it becomes the medium for the real content of his portraits and naturalistic sketches: his relationship with the characters. His wife, his children, his family, the professors that helped him, the painters that inspired him, everyone is there in a familiar and intimate universe held by Pisurwo’s care and will to honour them. His numerous sketchbooks are filled to the brim with drawings, faces, bodies, and always his signature, that he marks on the paper as a real creative act, along with the date and, strangely enough, the time at which the sketch was taken. This seemingly irrelevant detail demonstrates that for Pisurwo drawing is more then the simple registration of world around him, it is the immediate translation of that world, the almost instantaneous transcription of forms. Simply put, sketching has become one with the act of seeing, his own way of perceiving reality.

In his studio near the Ajanta caves, portraits are not the only Pisurwo’s occupation. Next to this mystical site, Pisurwo seems to be visited be all sorts of images, or even, of spirits. Yakshinis and yakshas, kings and queens and mythological figures invade his canvases in a dreamlike state that echoes cubist aesthetics and M.F.Hussein work. An immense cosmogony unravels before us as we witness the spirits suffer, rejoice, engage in dialogue or in sexual acts; we see them merge and overcome duality. As an obsessively repeated facial pattern, they saturate the page or the canvas, leaving nothing except their presence for us to see. From the smallest drawing to the largest canvas, this horror vacui could come from his relation and incessant observation of the Ajanta cave paintings themselves, evolved and transformed through Pisurwo’s sensibility. This overflowing of signs, lines, marks and gestures is profoundly characteristic of his work. Plates, family photos, house walls, insignificant objects, leafs, stones and even a dead cockroach, nothing is spared, everything is a suitable support for his magmatic creativity: an all-over that could cover hills, mountains, us all and the entire world.



A personal quest for meaning that, by engulfing everything around him, engages us in a journey beyond reality itself.


Painting as breathing,
drawing as living,
art as a way of being.


- Text by Niccolò Moscatelli

One Wednesday afternoon in 2003, as I walked to the Goethe Insitut at Max Muller Bhavan, Kala Ghoda, Bombay, on the pavement art gallery a young man was drawing fat black ink stokes of cubist renditions. Those portraits were immediately pleasing and curiosity made me strike a conversation with Pisurwo Jitendra Suralkar. I was 20 and had started a gallery in the apartment of a distant relative; it still exists in a larger space and concentrates on the decorative art scene. But somehow among the many exhibition happenings I curated in her space Pisurwo's drawing would form part of the exhibitions. Soon I left for France, we lost in touch until we reconnected through Facebook in 2015.

Pisurwo is a performance, or as the art critic Abhijeet Tamhane would say a retrospective in life. Pisurwo stands for the initials of his parent’s names, MF Hussain and Picasso. Pisurwo will make you accept and understand that he is the living incarnation of Picasso and Hussain, its rightful inheritor and for good reasons. I haven't met an artist who has had an independent view on life more vehemently defended if questioned than Pisurwo. He had been one of the founders of the Street Art Gallery at Kala Ghoda initiated by an artist Shenoy and the municipal commissioner to help poor artists who could not afford the rent of the Jehangir Art Gallery. A motley group of men and women would then organise shows on the street on metal hangars largely producing art for tourists and passerby aficionados. But Pisurwo soon rebelled at the easily peddled aesthetic that was introduced as clause to membership.

He is a loner, born into family of cultivators on a hill above the caves of Ajanta, Buddhist Caves that date from 2nd Century BCE he studied in a local art school that was run by the surrealist painter Gulzar Gawali. He lives in a distant suburb of Shahad, in the Thane district, and since 2015 has been Clark House's warhorse, for Pisurwo is the embodiment of our energy and the quest for collective emancipation. Pisurwo does not shy away from his ambition to break through dungeon of misrepresentation and inaccessibility. His performance is relative and real and ongoing.

- Text by Sumeshwar Sharma
 
Paris 2017

Pisurwo Jitendra Suralkar

TO LIVE TO PAINT TO LIVE
Pisurwo Jitendra Suralkar | Solo
Curated by Niccolò Moscatelli
Clark House Initiative Project Room
Preview: 12th October 2017
6 pm – 9.30 pm
Exhibition continues until 6th November 2017
Open all days from 11am – 7pm, Leaving Mondays.

Sunday 8 October 2017

‘Men hanging in local train like a dead meat’



Travelling back in the 17th century, where  Baroque painters as Rembrandt, Frans HalsDiego Velázquez used skillfully and minutely worked impastos to depict lined and wrinkled skin or the sparkle of elaborately crafted armor, jewelry, and rich fabrics. Vincent van Gogha 19th-century painter made notable use of impastos, building up and defining the forms in his paintings with thick, nervous dabs of paint. Painters of Twentieth century like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning often applied impastos with a dynamism and a gestural bravura that emphasized the physical qualities of the paint itself. Since then Raj More has expressed this style for last fifteen years working in Mumbai Kandivali with an approach of contemporary thoughts and chunky content.  The colors applied thickly to a canvas have become a staple technique of modern abstract and semi figurativein his work.
As viewers of art, we naturally focus on the finished product, the end result of the artist's labor. But some painting techniques draw our attention to the artist's process and make us think about how the paint was applied to the canvas. Impasto is one of these techniques. By applying paint to the canvas as thickly as possible, keeping the original brush marks visible, painters can create dramatic visual effects while also reminding us of the passion and the skill that went into the act of creation. In the artist work These paintings are mostly red, black, blue and yellow in color. They are all hot colors and highlight the sanguine nature of the city. The loaded strokes literally weigh the works and we could see the architectural features merging into a sort of abstraction in his works. These works could be called odes to the city of Mumbai. And each loaded stroke could also be seen as the building blocks of the same city. And if one tries to break it down to the constituent part of this city, one would reach a single slum cluster from which the city has metastasized into innumerable edifices and verities. 


In his studio, I came across huge paintings of a crow, the NYC bull, Rose etc. In the background, I observed thick strokes of various colors in a symphonic pattern. A closer look reveals that the color patches are nothing but the miniature version of the slum clusters that the artist sees everyday through the window of his studio. The artist fascination with crows is obvious “The Crow is a survivor and also a cleaner. Sometimes human beings are like crows; they clean the city and survive.” Says the artist.  Raj is greatly influenced with the slum clusters. “They are not his reality anymore. But they are there always as a reminder for him. At the other end of the studio I saw a freshly applied paint on canvas waiting to dry in these beautiful monsoons. The artist, also discussed about his personal life,where I saw resemblance with Johnny Lever and James Brown. The artist has old memories of Bollywood posters in his studio and old classic tales to share which are seen in his paintings and narratives.
He captures the variations of Mumbai; its character and so his paintings have socio-political message and events that develop the personality of Mumbai, He brilliantly paints mostly by using knife as a tool and uses colors lavishly to present the intricacies of each element that he portrays in his work; be it train, taxi, crow or simply the ground. 
His recent work on his new upcoming solo shows in Mumbai,Delhi & Bangalore, a Ganpati carried by a lady in a short skirt and showing her sexy legs and the auto driver starring her juicy lips in the mirror. Having a discussion with the artist and expressing our views I came across multiple thoughts regarding this painting. It allows the viewerto expand the meaning of the work apart from the artist reason to paint and display. The artist welcomes new ideas and thoughts which makes his paintings free from square to square and circle to circle dialogues. One can link his or her imagination with or without any sense and make sense totally.
“Chor Making Shor” There is no script and nothing for dialoguethe artist portrays situation of our assumptions which fit in this picture and then we become aware of the painting.  As the artist sees people like crows and he relates life situation of exclusive people cleaning up their trails which has similarities in looking at the painting. Even at certain stage one may feel that there is nothing left to express but that’s the beauty of his works. Constant interaction between the viewer and painting reminds me of those visually aware fellows who look, minutely and express themselves in abstract thoughts in museums and galleries. The viewer comes across the works with an awareness and one can keep exploring levels of one’s imagination. History has always asked when do we involve the common elements of existence? But as I see, it is here in Raj More work with his skills and life experiences he has mastered the route of visual communication in a common existence. 
( Raj More in his studio Ready with New Paintings )
 
“Tandoor Express” is the artist best work, and it represents the reality of me and everyone who are part of the local trains. All our journeys have stories. These journey and stories, the artist has expressed a slaughter of the locals being congested in a train which runs on mysterious mind and conscious dialogues within. “The artist relates the situation of a butcher house with the local trains the men hanging like dead meat.” The technique used to express the relations and message of the commuters are unimaginable. Raj in the past had seen and unseen and strong relations of butchers and slaughters of animals somewhere near his studios in early days. Where his inspiration comes from. 

Traveling back home I thought about a painting named “Ambanikholi number 12”. Yes, the tittle says it all but when I start wondering I remember the famous tagline “karloduniyamutthimein”. The artist representing the visual structure of “Antillawith the symbol of a horse regal and fierce in competitions, running his heart out to beat his competitors” Similarly the artist compares with “Kholi No 12” which has no connection with the tagline but the competition to acquire a house in the race of a common man’s life. Much is not needed to explain as the painting visually explains the status vs facts and the expression and the reason of the artistic expression.
After good yesterday with Artist Raj More in his studio having seen his paintings and listening to his life experience of being a visual artist. I personally feel that He (Raj) has seen and painted life visually and minutely. One can totally connect and make sense of his style and expression considering the thick paint applied on the surface. But in the end, it is the expression of the painter which makes the painting live and real. 


Visiting back at the artist studio after 2 days he brings a new painting “Mera Bharath Mahan” although the intension of the artist is precise and cut to cut when it comes to Nation and Citizens. Symbolically the crow and the bull has no relevance. But visual characters play their unique part of pride and signature of Bharath Desh.  This painting makes me feel a unity and a world of muscular existence of which energy and wealth are generated. A position of weak and strong forces strongly present in the country’s borders.Soon the viewing will be displayed and viewers can enjoy the works.
The viewing will be soon as the artist will be displaying his solo show in Mumbai present by Chhaap Art Gallery.

VinitLawande
Mumbai