Deep and Dark Spaces

From the 7^th of May to the 11^th of June, at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, Gieve Patel showed a selection of his works from 1971 to 2006. As a well-regarded poet and playwright, Patel has authored three books of verse and three plays. As a critic, he has written perceptively on contemporary Indian art and as an artist he has relentlessly probed the human condition. This retrospective of sorts provided an occasion for Abhay Sardesai to engage in a conversation with him.

ABHAY SARDESAI: WHEN AN ARTIST COMES FACE TO FACE WITH WORK HE HAS produced over a quarter of a century, how does he choose to look back on his journey? With this show, did you feel like re-arranging your canon – do some works embarrass you now and some others re-assure you? For me, Hooch Den and Bicyclist in a Field, both from 1979, are imbued with a lush poetic intensity whereas Near the Bus Stop (1991) and Crows (1999) refuse to rise above a certain level.

Gieve Patel: I hadn’t seen many of the displayed paintings in years. But over the last five weeks, I have been looking at them, all by myself and with others. When I encounter them now, I tend to go back to the time when I was working on each of them. It is more about how I lived through that time. What my ambitions for each of the works were and whether I have fulfilled them in some measure. This will sound extraordinarily vain but from the various collections that they have come from, I have rejected only one painting for this show (laughs).

I am a slow worker, I take my time. If I am not happy with a painting, I abandon it. I destroy it. If it is important to me, I keep it, display it.

A.S.: Which one did you reject for this show?

G.P.: One of the Wells. It did not quite work out.

A.S.: Your Wells constitute a remarkable suite - it is one of the finest themed series in Indian art over the last 20 years. One is tempted, however, to hear Freudian echoes in them. What is the fascination they exert on you? There is something meditative, almost spiritual about some of them. This might sound a little mischievous but don't you feel they share a kind of kinship with some works of the Neo-Tantricists and with Raza's Bindus?

G.P.: I am not inspired by the issues and images that the Neo-Tantricists were moved by. For me, the Wells are a result of a life-long fascination, which began in childhood, with the act of looking into them. Even now, I find it difficult to pass a well without wanting to peep into it. What is wonderful is that each well comes with a changing landscape, both inside it and outside. The shadows inside a well change as the day grows. There are different skies reflected on the water surface at different times of day. The interior of the well and the outer world play off each other. And your own subjective world, within you and what you observe outside, makes an intriguing connection with the well taking shape on your canvas.

A.S.: Wells also offer your viewer a world quite different from the one you otherwise choose to depict. Violence, anticipated or actual, seems to drive many of your themes. Corpses, carcasses, chopped hands and persons with handicaps seem to populate many of your works. Is mutilation a process that allows you to map and measure transformation in people and events? And how do you walk the tightrope - give in to and resist the charms of the Grotesque?

G.P.: I am not really drawn to violence. I hate watching violent movies, for instance. Haven't seen Kill Bill yet though I know I should. You know, there is normal existence and there is the need one feels to break free from it. Life is never always smooth; there is anger and destruction - who can escape this realization living in any century? Within each one of us exist deep springs of violence. I am aware of them in myself. They can be overwhelming. Works depicting violence are a way of dealing with this unmanageable material. Often, these are acts of closure, telling you about the things you have already dealt with. If these works are brought off as they should be, they could initiate corresponding capabilities in the viewer's psyche.

To come back to one of the works you mentioned earlier, Crows was part of a series of three paintings showing some pretty messy things. In this painting, you see four black blobs pecking at a dead mammal. As a painter, I enjoyed the depiction of the flesh, fat, arteries, all exposed. I enjoyed the skill with which I could capture the event, even the agitation of the tormenting crows. The second work, Crows with Debris (1999), shows a used condom, a torn chappal, a fence that has come apart and two crows that are picking at the remains of an animal that has been run over by a car. I remember Atul (Dodiya) hilariously chuckling over this "ultimate depiction of existential despair" (laughs). In order to control such a painting so that bathos and melodrama do not set in, the colours are extremely restrained. So, the deep and dark spaces of your mind are hopefully given a just expression.

The third work has a crow perched on a wall, with an eggshell in its beak. There is something emblematic about the image - on a wall with peeling graffiti which could stand for something as basic as an attack on language itself, the crow stands firm in his moment of subdued triumph. The more bloody imagery of the earlier two works is not needed here. The violence is more subsumed, almost not there.

I have a horror of moralizing. I would never wish to paint violent themes to lecture my audience.

A.S.: There is an attempt in much of your work to get under the skin of the underdog - lives of urchins, petty labourers, migrants and slum-dwellers are presented with feeling. Even mythological characters like Daphne and Eklavya whom you re-visit in your sculptures (2007) are victims of power-drunk hierarchs. Issues related to an unjust social order have been explored by you elsewhere as well – the collision between Parsi and Adivasi worlds in your play, Mr. Behram (1988), for instance.

G.P.: There are reasons for this. My father's family had estates in the Adivasi belt in the Dahanu area in Thane district, and in my mother's family there were two doctors. From an early age I witnessed the rampant disparities in our society. In early youth I tended to romanticize the Adivasi existence. But this could not last long. I was soon more than uneasy seeing the poverty, the squalor and their ill-health. At the same time, I continued to be fascinated by the wonderful groundedness that all so-called primitive people share.

A.S.: Dark colour-shades seem to overwhelm much of your work from the '70s. This has always intrigued me. Conference Table (1972), Statesmen on a Floral Rostrum (1972), Lighted Platform (1974) and the exceptional Hooch Den (1979) come to mind. Was this approach part of a conscious strategy?

G.P.: The reason was technical, but perhaps not technical only. At the beginning of my career, I used to feel that everything I did would fall apart. That I would not be able to 'contain' a painting. So, I would cover the surface of the canvas with one single colour. Then I would start working on different parts of the painting in a way that each time I would have to relate to that colour in the background. The entire evolving work would thereby be anchored to that basic colour, and this anchoring would 'hold it together', prevent it from falling apart. That basic colour was often a dark one, because a dark shade has a greater centripetal energy, keeping things in, not allowing them to fly away. Later, that all-covering basic colour started to become more adventurous, as in Bicyclist in a Field (1979), where it is a luminous green. Now, when the work was completed, the finished painting would need to tell one that the choice of that strange, original all-covering colour was a just choice, that it was not arbitrary.

It was only sometime in the ’80s that I became confident enough to let go of this manner of working.

A.S.: You also use different kinds of textures or patterns over large areas in paintings so that they slowly start filling up the negative space or begin to define an object. One can see this method in operation in works like Shipbuilding in Mumbai (2005) or Stroll (1997), for instance.

G.P.: Yes, it’s part of an attempt to avoid the perspectival features of classical renaissance art – the creation of depth, the use of the vanishing point, among others. When there are different interweaving layers of paint which do not obliterate each other but in fact form a kind of receding skein, a see-through, the viewer’s eye tends to move from layer to layer. In the process, a sense of depth is created. I also use strategies for transitions from one part of the canvas to the other. For example, discrete marks leading gradually into plain uniform surfaces, and vice-versa. I also like to surprise the eye by making negative surfaces take priority over ‘worked’ surfaces.

A.S.: Your last show, Eklavya, Daphne (2007), presented by The Guild Art Gallery at the Museum Gallery, Mumbai, was an attempt at crossing over to sculpture. Do you feel that your exploration of desire and excess, ambition and devastation, in a new art form was successful? When does a painter feel that he has failed as a sculptor? I started off not responding to the works at all, but over the last three years, I found them evoking resistance and despair in different convincing ways.

G.P.: I've been asked again and again, "Why those two myths?" And with each attempt at an answer I've been getting more articulate, let's hope also closer to the truth! Despair, yes. Clearly enough. But I feel gratified by your mention of resistance. On the face of it there is none - Eklavya merely chops off his thumb at Dronacharya's demand; Daphne silently suffers herself to be metamorphosed into vegetation. But each of them has come to this suffering, however extreme that suffering, out of their own choice! Because the alternative was unthinkable. And with Eklavya, there could even be a kind of self-annihilating defiance: "You think I can't do it? Here, take your wretched gurudakshina!"

Now, the question is, have I been able to translate this into sculpture? Here are some of the possible 'means': the sculptures are intentionally primitive, which takes them closer to their mythic origin. The repeated and insistent imprint of my fingers on the clay hopefully asserts the vulnerable humanity of the figures. And the directness and frontality of the postures and iconography might just be contributing to a feeling of resistance. None of this, incidentally, was planned to be so. I offer you wisdom, or unwisdom, by hindsight.

A.S.: Any critical thoughts about contemporary art - its successes and failures?

G.P.: I am not familiar enough with newer trends to be able to make a fair assessment. On the painting scene, currently, young artists from Kerala are showing a new energy, and great promise.