Layered tapestry

While developing an elaborate cartography of the local, immediate and autobiographical, Jitesh Kallat's works are a tribute to the universal human will to survive, says RANJIT HOSKOTE.

JITISH KALLAT has emerged, over the last five years, as an important representative of the younger generation of Indian artists. The 1974-born painter's works testify to his live-wire alertness to a fast-changing environment, to the complex

braidedness of the local and the global that defines contemporary India. Kallat is one of those fortunate artists whose image- making activity is honed rather than dissipated by prolificity: he has already held five solo exhibitions, and has shown at a number of prestigious international venues, including the first Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale (1999) and the seventh Havana Biennale (2000). He was one of the five artists short-listed for the Sotheby's Prize for Contemporary Indian Art 2000.

On the evidence of his recent suite of large mixed-media canvases, shown recently at Gallery Chemould, Mumbai, Kallat appears to have renounced the high-spirited playfulness that animated his earlier work. His painted surfaces continue to be inventive, but are far less cluttered with polyvalent imagery. Kallat has also reduced his reliance on the language games he has enjoyed orchestrating; he no longer engages in the interplay between long, mock-scholarly titles and arresting, unparaphraseable images that formed a crucial element of his allegorical embroidery.

Instead, Kallat now presents his investigations into the floating present as sombre meditations on human vulnerability and mortality: in the process, three interwoven themes that have long been implicit in his work come into sharp focus. The first of these is a mythology of the life cycle, an account of birth, maturity, death and regeneration that connects archetypal and public realities with elements of personal history. The second theme is a retrieval of autobiography, which permits the artist to record his ancestral Kerala past and relate it his cosmopolitan Mumbai ethos. The third of these themes is Kallat's compelling need to bear painterly witness to the experiential textures of his home-base, Mumbai.

Appropriately enough, given this layered tapestry of themes, Kallat's leitmotif in the current series is the maze: it recurs as the womb of electronic circuitry in "Ibid., p. 108"; the shadowy ancestral house and the DNA helix masquerading as a creeper, in "Herbs in My Maternal Home"; the dizzying crowd at the local train-station, and the body dispersed like a jigsaw puzzle of organs, in "Ibid.". Indeed, these paintings could be seen as a survivor's diaries, for the artist acts both as minotaur and monitor, negotiating his way through the labyrinth that is his cultural habitat.

The maze also serves as a model for Kallat's intricate formal transactions. While yet at art school, he had sought to re-invent his painted surface after cues provided by popular culture and mass culture, whether wall-posters, graffiti or advertising signage; now, however, Kallat has re-formatted his surface to resemble a television or computer monitor with a CD-ROM or Internet-like display.

Simulated scan-lines, achieved by ridging and flattening a corrugated layer of pigment, play an important role in his paintings, as does the spectral flicker that edges many of his figures. Kallat also extends his enthralling command over a diversity of media and sources in these works, deploying both the artist's discreet acrylics and the housepainter's more robust ones, as well as automobile spray-paint, gold powder, and templates provided by photographs, newspaper pictures and xeroxed copies of images.

The child, as an archetypal symbol of hope, an explorer who comes anew to the experience of the world, has long preoccupied Kallat. In "Ibid., p. 108", a painting that combines lyrical intensity with contemplative depth, the child appears in chalky outline at the centre of an underground maze of circuitry shown in transverse section.

The painting is shaped like the computer-morphed version of a child's puzzle; a plant sprouts from the child, its roots and flowering stem coiling outwards. At the top margin of the painting, we see the body of a man lying prone, his stomach an egg with a tree that sprouts from it and spreads into the sky.

Kallat presents us with a cyber-Osirian myth of regeneration that links the earth's rhythms to the woman's, delivering his uterine symbolism in an imagery drawn from computerware, acknowledging the now-inextricable linkages between organic life and electronic technology. Fittingly, the "Ibid." of the title, suggesting a reference to an encyclopaedia of work in progress, indicates a continuity with the artist's earlier concerns; the "108" is a tongue-in-cheek allusion to a number regarded as sacred in Hindu numerology, the number of the names of the Divine.

Kallat's paintings have, for the last five years, derived their main propulsion from a young artist's abundant confidence in the future and its possibilities; in some of his new works, this optimism is held in counterpoint by a fear of the loss of the past.

The matrix of "Herbs in My Maternal Home" is a decade-old property document that lists the artist's maternal family. Since the document is readable, the viewer finds himself voicing the legal phrases as he looks at the painting; the words fluctuate against a luminous self-portrait, stretched through a fax-copier and transfer-enlarged onto the canvas. At the bottom of the painting, in a glow of dull-gold spectral light, stands a latticed house, with a dark door and a creeper lacing through. The creeper is both a staircase and the DNA helix. It symbolises the genes of the family, now scattered like spores across other provinces, other continents, as well as the genes of the family herbarium, now under threat from transnational pharmaceutical corporations that wish to patent traditional resources.

The most wrenchingly forceful paintings in the present show are those in which Kallat accounts for the lifeworld of Mumbai. He confronts the phenomenon of urban shock, the alternating stimulus and sedation provided by the crushing density of 12 million people on an island built on a foundation of rotting fish and palm fronds.

He revels in, and elegises, the chaos that is his Third-World metropolitan environment: the graffiti-scarred walls, the hawker- peopled arcades, the wild-traffic streets and the sardine-packed local trains. "Ode to the Spinal Cord" takes its title from the resilient vertebrae of the millions of commuters who travel daily on Mumbai's three suburban railway systems. There is both menace and humour in the disposition of the figures leaning out of the train that bulks large in the work. The surface of the painting is furred and scratchy, the rawness and edginess of the treatment in consonance with the subject: it condenses within itself a history of class conflict, commuter riots, accidents and rail- stoppage agitations. Four insets, placed at the four corners of the painting, show a running athlete: a personification of the city who may well be racing a stationary marathon on a treadmill.

The common factor binding Kallat's crowds, overriding their diverse ethnic, religious and regional origins, is their mortality. The painting "Ibid." (its title indicating an internal cross-reference, this time to Kallat's 1999-2000 work, "Busy"), may be read as a casualty list of the speed machine that is the metropolis.

At the core of this many-layered painting is the frail body, its limbs under pressure from all quarters: the body that is the battered interface between self and world. A swirling crowd flickers in and out of focus like a television image. Superimposed at various points over this modern-day Inferno are obituary-column portraits neatly picked out and detailed: anonymity and personality, the artist seems to argue, are equally random outcomes in the city's lottery of circumstance.

A third layer of the painting consists of the human bodys internal organs, marked in blue, as though coloured by a chemical tracer released in the blood-stream. Subject to lesions, seizures and assaults, the body itself seems like a beleaguered city, the skin its strained perimeter of defence.

The north-rose indicating the directions at the lower left-hand corner of "Ibid." implies that this palimpsest could also be treated as a map, which is significant.

For Jitish Kallat has managed a considerable feat: while developing an elaborate cartography of the local, immediate and autobiographical, he simultaneously renders a moving tribute to the universal human will to survive, the vital human energies of overcoming that express themselves, however variously, in varying terrains of oppression.

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