Masks & Metaphors by Gallery Sanskriti

JAYA GANGULY MASKS & METAPHORS

14/1/2011 - 12/2/2011 | 12 pm - 8 pm

MASKS & METAPHORS Exhibiting since the eighties Jaya Ganguly has created an outstanding body of artworks abounding in extremely unconventional images of humans, especially, of the female species. Looking at her men and women, and not very easy sometimes to make gender distinctions between them, one might think of her work almost as an aesthetic apotheosis of ugliness. Women occupy the prime space in her pictorial scheme. They exist singly or coupled or in groups in her canvases, not specifically for the male gaze, nor to answer to the male description of the female form and figure with features focussing either her sexual desirability or sexist distinctions of female beauty. Jaya’s women are demonic, grotesque, often with ugly distortions of not only the most feminine, but also the human, features of the faces and physiques. Ugliness has often been the subject of sculpture and painting through the ages as a foil to beauty and also emblematizing sins or moral and social aberrations. Aggressive formal distortions or representational disorders are primary tropes of modernist avant-garde art which began with Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism and have continued through other art movements of the twentieth century. The centuries old norms of image making broke down, giving way to a new set of aesthetic cannons, marking beauty of art off from natural beauty. Picasso’s Les Damoiselles de’Avignon or Woman Weeping are classic instances of modernist art in which aesthetic beauty thrives on the deconstruction of natural beauty celebrated by the cannons of pre-modernist art. The impact was shocking for the contemporary art audience who, as the famed Italian author Umberto Eco says in his On Ugliness (2007), “did not consider them as beautiful portrayals of ugly things but ugly portrayals of reality.” Jaya Ganguly’s imagery including that of her recent mixed medias is, of course, neither beautiful portrayal of ugly things (in the sense she selects only ugly things for portrayal), Nor does she make ugly portrayals of a beautiful reality. She has forged for herself, an artistic sign system, a complete visual idiom, to portray ugliness that abounds in the realities of life around. But the ugliness portrayed is a broad spectrum critique couched in metaphorical images of mask-like faces and figures in revolting physical distortions. They do not specify any area of life and reality that, in the artist’s despairing perception, has degenerated and reached the bottom depth of darkness from which these grotesque beings loom up in the most creative moments of her imagination. This ugliness is an abstraction, of moral, spiritual, cultural, social, and even environmental degeneration all taken together, morphed into these deformed nightmarish visages, and versions, of living beings. The mask-like faces, however, are not to be confused with those in the primitive or tribal art or artifacts which generated in the early 20th century a set of new aesthetic norms for many avantgarde art movements. The values and vocabulary of primitive African art recycled in modernist idioms gave contemporary art a charged outlook of solemn primordial expressiveness. In Ms Ganguly’s canvases too, particularly the portraits, there is a certain primal quality of expression in their overall formal finesse especially in the erratic lineal contours and evocative shades of colour. But what they exude is not a feel of spiritual awe, a fearful and reverential awareness of dark forces embedded in our existential essence but that of nightmarish terrors born out of the distortions and destructions of all norms and values in every sphere of life and reality. Distortions of forms and figures emblematize this pervasive corruption and the resultant ugliness shaped as humans makes visible the horror of what is absolutely “rotten in the state of Denmark”. Formal distortions in these

canvases, therefore, yield images of beings more repulsive than awesome, more grotesque than solemn, unlike as in the primitive masks or the images of primitive deities. The features are so deformed and dislocated within the formats of human face and figures that they look not unlike those who appear from outer space in horror-packed science fiction films. About a dozen frames in this series sport portraits, both frontal and profile, of mask-like faces. In one instance which could be the title piece of the series, a mask is placed beside a profiled face, telling apart the one from the other to eschew any confusion between the two and to underscore that the faces in the rest are not masks. With the mask removed, the face looks the same, if not more scary and surreal, and as such it assumes meanings of metaphorical proportions. These portrait heads often defy description. A dark almost silhouetted face is profiled only with a bulbous nose, a rounded chin and in between a large mouth spewing up innards evoked in visceral red. Its pate is cut open to reveal a pool of mauve blood with floating objects not unlike amoeboid cells and two tiny forklike hands. Another full frontal face has all its features located with an uncanny lack of symmetryâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;two fish-shaped glassy eyes, one sliding down the right flank of a double barrelled nose and a pair of tubular lips stretching ear to ear with a cut in the middle above which the wide cheek gapes open in a gangrene-like wound. Most weird is a face, its skin and flesh peeled off, guffawing with an awful array of gumless teeth. Cold terror is the image of a skull in profile with villainy oozing out of its live eye and lips. More repulsive are the full length figures who in their grotesque distortions take on the looks of subhumans. They are often female nudes seated in a chair, or in impossible postures of crouching or squatting, baring not only breasts and genitalia but also the entrails like tangled chords. They sport loathsome twists and bends in reptilian torsos, repellent swells and sags in their young or aged flesh and their limbs and extremities wave and wiggle like snakes or climbing plants. There is however a mix of the beastly and the burlesque in many of them, rather like characters in comic strips. The young male nude in the black and white canvas appears more confused than allured by the balcony of bulging out breasts of his inviting female spouse. Also funny and fearsome is the monumental female in brown and pink who crouches with a huge S bend and makes a demonic grimace with a massive set of bared teeth. But the flabby swell and flamboyant undulations in her figural contours may remind one of those crazy characters in Asterix comics, even though that adds an edge to the horror of the tragedy evoked in the series as a whole. But where does the strength and beauty of these artworks reside, which treat subjects so despairing and in motifs so grotesque and ugly? Beauty of art, of course, does not ride on the things evoked for their natural beauty. Art succeeds most when it forcefully impacts upon the viewer, getting across to him the ideas that go into the making of the images. Ms Gangulyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s handling of imagery with both fecund imaginative approach and mastery in technical execution ensures this triumph of her artistic idiom to ideally flesh out her nightmarish vision of an ugly reality. She has employed to excellent effects a wide range of her lineal, textural and chromatic resources to make each portrait a unique image of metaphorical import. by Manasij Majumder