JJ VALAYA
Art
Building blocks (l-r) Valaya’s untitled photographs from Jodhpur, Chandigarh and Dufftown, Scotland
Man for all seasons
Sonam Joshi talks to JJ Valaya about his forays into photography.
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ast year, designer JJ Valaya surprised the fashion frat by bringing out a book of his photographs called Decoded Paradox, a portrait series in which his acquaintances posed around Delhi in historical costumes he had designed. This year, Valaya is back off the runway with his first gallery shows: one for a new series of architectural photographs, The Soul in the Space, and another for Decoded Paradox. “The first show is always very challenging,” Valaya told Time Out. “I did not want people to relate to it because of my fashion back ground, yet I did not want people to detach me totally from that.” At one level, the elaborate costumes of Decoded Paradox drew upon the Indian fashion maven’s familiarity with design. At another, the photo graphs played with unexpected contrasts such as the presence of elaborate regal characters from the past alongside the chaos of present-day public places. “It could well end up like a fashion show, but that was not the idea,” Valaya said. “The idea was to jux tapose two periods of time of a city [Delhi] together in one frame. Therefore, costume becomes intrinsic to the conversation.”
The seeds for The Soul in the Space were sown further afield, during an artistic residency in Duff town, Scotland (a town known for its whiskey distilleries) that Valaya attended in 2011, along with five other artists. While he said the island’s picture-postcard beauty bored him, Valaya was inspired by the structure of lines in industrial sheds in the Glenfiddich distillery where he was stay ing. “I discovered the magic of lines, geom etry and architecture. So I started thinking about key influences in my life,” he said. In the year that followed, he travelled to Jodhpur, the city where he was born, and Chandigarh, where he went to school. The resulting pho tographs, rather than the clichéd long-shots of familiar structures, are close-ups that focus on the geometric beauty of specific architectural elements. They also highlight the textures of construc tion materials: rock and stone at Mehrangarh fort in Jodhpur, metal in Dufftown and concrete in Le Cor busier’s structures in Chandigarh. The minimalism of the series is a contrast to the lavish and
opulent visual appeal of Valaya’s couture, and by extension, the cos tumes in Decoded Paradox. How ever, as with his fashion designs, these images reflect a fascination with history. “There is a reason it’s called The Soul in the Space,” he said, “because in each of the three [places] I was confronted with a scenario where either a city was over exposed or already too familiar to people, or irrelevant in a way – and in each one we discover a soul.” Valaya’s foray into the art world also provokes larger questions about the relationship between art and fashion. In recent years, a number of international exhibitions, like the blockbuster Alexander McQueen retrospec tive at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, have brought fash ion designers into the museum. In our interview, Valaya downplayed the connection between these two worlds: “There is one me, the designer, the public persona that people are aware of, the second is the private me, and it’s almost like an alter ego,” he said. However last year, his fashion collection
Each of the three cities were overexposed or irrelevant
“Tasveer” followed the history of photography, from black-andwhite to sepia to hand-painted and colour. The Soul in the Space is the first time he’s photographed architecture, but Valaya has had some recent exposure to exterior and interior design through the development of his parallel home business. Indeed, Valaya has had a long association with art and photo graphy. While he began painting in school, the self-taught photogra pher got his first Olympus camera in 1988, in exchange for a car. And he plans to continue with art out side of the fashion world as well. Valaya will publish The Soul in the Space as a book, and eventually, he said, make a series of mixedmedia works. Despite the insepa rable link between contemporary art and commerce, Valaya said these projects give him a way out: “Art gives me the freedom to be fearless. I am in a field – fashion, home, interior – [where] there are commercial limitations. There is an influence of another person who’s going to either buy the piece or live in that house… but art is meant to be free and this is what it’s all about,” he said. The Soul in the Space is ongoing at Nature Morte. Decoded Paradoxis ongoing at Nature Morte, Gurgaon. See Exhibitions.
88 www.timeoutdelhi.net November 9 – 22 2012
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