Gigi Scaria. Installation view of Wheel (Wood, iron, glass, paint and motor. 144" x 108" x 54". 2009). At the back can be seen Propeller (Acrylic on canvas. 60" x 60". 2009) and A Metaphysical Speculation (Acrylic on canvas. 60" x 60". 2009).

Variations on a Theme

Gigi Scaria's exploration of the new global city highlights the barrenness of its sites, discovers Abhay Sardesai.

AMUSEMENT PARK, GIGI SCARIA'S SHOW AT GALLERY Chemould, Mumbai, from the 5th to the 31st of October 2009, had various rides to offer. A rotating Ferris wheel with apartment-block shaped seats stood next to paintings of a swinging boat and a seesaw as a video presented a landscape saturated with electronic hoardings, fly-overs and giant gravitron-like thrill-toys. Scaria presented the ageographical city - uniformly pretty, menacingly anonymous and notoriously replicable.

From the project Dilli Dur Ast (2006) to the solo Absence of an Architect (2007), Scaria has explored the transforming urbanscape of globalising India, with special reference to the city of Delhi. Here, he dedicatedly investigated the lure of well-ordered, neatly managed and amenities-packed high-rises that transform real land into real estate.

Buildings were stacked, one on top of the other, to erect a pedestal and a serrated inner wheel of a gyroscope in the painting A Metaphysical Speculation even as they were piled tidily to create a floating fairground vessel in the painting Boat; in the painting Wanderer above the Sea, they were haphazardly heaped to create composite fortresses that looked like a cross between the Hawa Mahal and the Great Wall of China. Against their sprawl, the beturbanned twin of Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Mist did not quite come across as a misplaced anachronism. The awe framed in the painting was carefully undercut by the irony. The acrylic on canvas, Propeller, looked like a toy model for a cellular jail, a new age Panopticon. Control and consumption went hand in hand to create a picture of a dangerously well-organised dystopia.

Scaria evoked the sinister homogenization of city spaces by presenting buildings in patterns that confirmed boringly sanitized designs. The slum-less worlds erased of people and fashioned with a suffocating neatness successfully brought alive claustrophobic habitats with their smartly tailored environments. However, even as the overarticulation of sameness underscored the deadpan nature of emerging cityscapes, it seemed to take away from some of their eternal features - the overwhelming messiness and chaos which engulf but also enable vibrant urban life. How do different kinds of urban worlds contradict each other, collide with each other? What happens between and beyond the walls of these self-contained bubbles? The show could have gained in quality had Scaria chosen to address these questions.