Gallery Beyond from Mumbai took the works of two Delhi-based artists, Puneet Kaushik and Abhijit Pathak, to the Busan Art Fair in Korea. By Uma Nair
While Pathak’s abstraction were a mélange of threads, textiles and paint, Puneet Kaushik’s crimson coloured works looked like fibre, yarn and a host of other materials woven into his mosaic of memories. Kaushik is known to have the gift of seeing art in everything. Rather paradoxically then, his works are intensely personal, almost autobiographical.
While his early work included vibrant, dreamlike watercolours, he is better known for his mixed media sculptural installations, utilising a bewildering spectrum of materials including glass closets, terracotta, bone, hair, charcoal, paper pulp, pebbles and maps. These works often exhibit a fascination with the human body in all its visceral detail, including abundant use of the scarlet.
Kaushik has a penchant for creating eye-catching abstracts (that looks like an aerial view of quaint creatures.
Aggregate of red
Married to textile designer Rema Kumar, he draws from his extensive experience of working with various indigenous arts and crafts traditions across India . The works at Busan looked like miniature formats of large installations he has done over the years- featuring canopy-like structures made out of jute and an array of wicks (yellow/white commonly sold during Diwali season). With small sheets of handmade paper, you see an aggregate of red ‘cells’ made out of carpet fibres and yarns. Ameobic, ambiguous yet deeply attractive it looks like a miasma that flows, is dynamic and never static.
His crimson tide references could belong anywhere as they have a universality and uniqueness- signifying a raw physicality, the bonds of flesh and blood that unite animals and humans - and the idea of mortality.
Kaushik reflects inventive and ingenuous ways and never repeats his creations-but they run like a recurrent series. It could perhaps have cultural symbolism as in the alpana or rangoli patterns drawn by women in several parts of India.
It is his own ideas that get translated into digital print, acrylic ink and glass markers — his fascination with branching structures like roots and an interest in traditional textiles reveals itself in his seemingly delicate wire-mesh works. These foreground the importance of the line in sculptural tones as well as speak about the truth in materials and abstraction being an amalgamation of experience and a journey. Thus, Puneet Kaushik persistently finds permutations in the very nature of creating abstractions that quiver with life.
Mosaic of lines
Abhijit Pathak had canvasses of sheer abstraction. Dots and lines and debris seem to brim and float. You gaze at it for a long time and then you want to close your eyes. As you close your eyes, colours and countless shapes, as well as images rise to the surface. Furthermore, you are consumed by all sorts of sensations, as if you are listening to music that you’ve never encountered. What is overriding is an indescribable sense of tranquility and comfort, as if passing time carries you to a peaceful and beautiful pastoral place where you can sink into an abyss of quietude .
Abhijit Pathak won the lalit Kala National Award in 2010 just before he finished his post graduation from Jamia Milia University in Delhi. Pathak is an abstractionist with passion and deep conviction. His works are colour fields of infinitude in which we do not see a definite sense of process. But there is a deep understanding of the mystic rules of the beginning, the middle and end, there are deeper truths of the variation of the principle of fragmentation and fragility in a world which begins with the gravity of the earth.
Archaeological Excavations
As if he is an archaeologist who lives in the summation of his excavations, this young artist who hails from Varanasi is a practitioner of the deeper tunes of resonance that builds and breathes within the windows of his inner reservoir. With earth colours, pigments, Acrylic colours, fabric, charcoal, and colour pencils, it is free association from the start to the finished state; kept alive by an intersection of physical experience, individual feeling and ideas of the deeper truths of living in reality .But there is also great lyricism and you are not surprised to know he is a trained tabla player.
When asked about his techniques that seem to embrace different tenors in materiality Pathak states: “I create my colour fields with different materials because my language is about the character of earth surfaces and soils. I try to create many different layers by wanting to distinguish between rough surfaces of natural earth colours, by using torn pieces of fabric, creating many zones of uneven forms. In a way it is like the many emotions and feelings and mappings that live within me. I get fabrics from different places-from lucknow, Chandni Chowk and Kolkata. I look for indigenous techniques that reflect textures and methods that are local.You can say that when I create these works it is the internal mind that lives within my inner reservoir. My works are born out of my reflections. It is like opening the windows of an inner world but also looking at it in a subtle way as the travelogue of history.”