O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?
W.B. Yeats, Among School Children
There was a
long, white hallway and in the centre was a bright pink spot surrounded by
images, colours and strokes. It was the fountainhead from where
sprang a million faces, hands, feet and human forms.
Three beauties
came together: Mind, Brush and Space.
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| Ailamma Art Gallery: Harvest is on |
The Atelier Exhibition, “Serving, Waiting on Hand and Foot,
a Conscious Choice for Creating Visual Art Within Gallery Space” by Koeli
Mukherjee Ghose at Ailamma Art Gallery, Hyderabad, 6th-30th July 2016, was in many ways an
avant-garde defiance of theories that rule the contemporary art world.
Atelier, a French word, refers to a studio cum workshop.
It celebrates the co-existence of the artist and the art. The calm and
relaxed atmosphere was Koeli's retreat and was set up by renowned
calligrapher, Mr Parameshwar Raju. Koeli's paintings, as one would normally
expect were not mounted on a solemn frame but clipped to a string, like the
unfinished negatives in a photographer's dark room. This was not only Koeli's
way of freeing the artwork physically for a more intimate interaction
with observers but also to challenge those who consider art as a feudal
act, confined to the upscale ivory towers of society.
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| A dark room's twin |
Within a few weeks, Koeli produced more than hundred
paintings. Her technique includes, calligraphy, wet on wet and wash painting. The
human body forms the core of her work. It is a body in action and abstraction.
The defamiliarisation is on as hands and feet waiting and serving merge with colours,
figures, isolated strokes and entwined lines. Koeli’s vision defies the Cartesian
mind-body duality and moulds itself into a shape of its own. As Koeli said, it acts
as a conveyor of everyday socio-cultural sense. The women in her paintings are
busy in their household work. Predictable images of women tending children and
making peripatetic journeys from inside to outside keep recurring.
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| Women in their everyday life |
Koeli’s
paintings are also emotions recollected in tranquility. The days she spent in
Visva-Bharati , Shantiniketan as a student, as a learner attain a living form in
her work. The dense, arching foliage and the fluttering young hearts of the
campus find a colourful place in her imagination. The same scenario is rendered
differently when Koeli imagines it as a political borderline where people would
rather turn away from each other.
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| Foliage and Fluttering hearts |
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| When borders rise |
There are other
paintings that have emerged out of conversations with her contemporaries. Certain
works also display a free and spontaneous confluence of the public and the
private space.
Spirituality too forms an inevitable aspect of
Koeli’s work. It never, however, floats on the canvas in a sectarian sense but
in a subtle, phantasmic evocation of the
unknown through a very agile colour palate.
Koeli’s growth
as an artist primarily began in Hyderabad. Her work is original and fresh. The
lines, colours, prominent, fading, blotting create an organic unity that is rare
and unfamiliar. Her brush glides uninhibitedly over the paper, travels a sea of
emotions and then comes back to its core, its origin which is often the human
form both concrete and abstract.
“Atelier” was a new experience for me. Breaking
dimensions of perceptions. It unveiled that art may not be lofty or a wave of tensed
and artistic nerves; It may pour forth of a beautiful and calm woman sitting among friends, musing about the physical and metaphysical limits of life and beyond.
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| Add caption |
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| Koeli with Mr Parameshwar Raju and Mr Vijaya Rao |
Jhilam.C
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