Mattancherry Mix, 2018

Mattancherry Mix
“[T]he impression of what life … looks like in art”. Could there be a more pithy job description
of what painting qualified as representational attempts to convey? Coming from Clement
Greenberg, famous for his advocacy of abstract art to the exclusion of anything that
smacked of the figurative or the descriptive (or worse, the merely illustrative), the
formulation might surprise. Less so is its laconism about “life” in that when Greenberg did
write about pictorial work that was representational it was to appraise the plastic values
(line, colour, modelling) and rarely, if ever, to address the nature of the subject in question,
let alone the subjectivity displayed or deflected by the painter. “Picture making, not just
picturing or depicting”, reads one of his Detached Observations from 1976, fifteen years after
the publication of Art and Culture, the collection of essays that crowned his reputation as the
preeminent art critic of his time. But if Greenberg’s exacting formalism was more than
perfectly matched to analyzing the purely technical dynamic at work in the abstract painting
that he saw as the apogee of modernist art — the artisanal grappling with what he deemed
to be the irreducible convention specific to the medium of painting, namely, flatness and the
delimitation of flatness — his stress on picture making made picturing or depicting a blind
spot when it came to art that was not abstract. As it happens, the year of Greenberg’s
“detached observations” also saw the appearance of a manifesto of a very different kind:
This was R.B. Kitaj’s gallant, generous and far from detached initiative to reclaim the glorious
heritage of the representation of the human form as art historical sustenance for restoring
the centrality of “an art in the image of people”, to borrow a phrase from his brilliant
Introduction in the catalogue that accompanied The Human Clay, the exhibition he
organized in London of a range of stylistically very eclectic works focussed on the depiction
of the human figure. At the same time Kitaj was hardly oblivious to the achievements of
artists who had pared the world down to its abstract “first principles”, exemplarily in the
work of Mondrian, as evinced by a section on one of the tutelary figures of modernist
abstraction in his catalogue devoted to figurative art. The Human Clay was a bid to break
the stranglehold of the doxa that abstraction had become; for a diehard formalist like
Greenberg, however, what mattered was the clay, irrespective of the human forms into
which it could be shaped. It was irrelevant if artists so figuratively inclined were as
preoccupied with plastic values as those for whom figural depiction was not a concern.
Kitaj’s advocacy of the human figure as the most noble subject for art (accompanied as it
was by a sense of dismay at the erosion of the practice of drawing from the figure, notably as
part of art school instruction) was hardly programmatic and nor was it a plea for a revival of
what came to be known as narrative painting. But the depiction of the human form scarcely
disallowed the evocation of the particular milieu, the private or public incident or anecdote,
in which the representation was concretely or imaginatively situated, and this sense of a

moment of lived experience is what came to the fore in the work of some painters in the wake
of Kitaj’s call for “an art in the image of people”. That call found an answering echo in India in
the early 1980s and its conduit was the painter and critic Timothy Hyman during his stay at
the art school in Baroda as artist-in-residence. He found a climate that was far from hostile to
figurative art, although there were exponents of painterly abstraction, too (ranging from
neo-tantric to trans-national idioms) in other parts of the country. The preeminent abstract
artist living and working in Baroda was, of course, Nasreen Mohamedi, but the pristine and
rarefied geometry of lines through which her drawings envision the coordinates of another
realm on a radically different plane was light years away from the hubbub of the here and
now on which representational art came to stake its ground on the heels of Hyman’s
ambassadorial role in claiming the primacy of the human figure for painting and the
narratives in which it was inscribed. (Mohamedi’s apartness on the Indian art scene, not to
mention the solitude that accompanied the absolutism of her striving, marked her work as
something of an anomaly and the recognition of the magnitude of her achievement as an
abstract artist of the first rank only came much later, more than two decades after her
untimely death in 1990). The painter in Baroda for whom representation was not a polemical
issue (as it came to seem at the time in the light of the zealousness of some of the newly
minted partisans of the narrative impulse) was Bhupen Khakhar, since his painting from
its very inception (in the early 1970s) had made common cause with the human figure and
the social microcosm in which it was embedded. His playful, sometimes mischievous
sponsorship of kitsch, the happy promiscuity of “high” and “low” — the interfusion of what
he had gleaned from high art pictorial conventions and the vernacular idioms of popular
culture to which he was gleefully drawn — gave his representational language its particular
flavour and queerness. His pictorial audacity was identical with his formal awkwardness; his
manner could appear to be gauche but not his sincerity. Indeed, the “gaucheness” would
become a signature of his style of empathy and affect. It was he who set the precedent for
an exploration of forms of pictorial narration that were iconographically and thematically
anchored in a lived social reality. (The “magical realism” of Gulammohammed Sheikh’s
paintings, steeped as they were in art historical lore and erudition, notably of Islamic
miniature painting, offered another model of narrativizing the quotidian in small town
India.). More than any other artist at the time, it was Khakhar who made the life-world of
social outcasts and marginals – “men without qualities” – the motivating device of a poetics
of fellow-feeling and companionship. His inclusive approach and eclectic means made for
an openness to earlier legacies of figurative art, an expansive view that enabled him to shape
the particular complexion of eros that the representation of the (male) human body had for
him. And representation was, before anything else, a question of language – as it was for
Mohamedi, an artist whose work and sensibility were at the antipodes of Khakhar’s practice.
Both emerged at roughly the same time, and the attitudes that their radically opposed
bodies of work are emblematic of constitute an art historical conjuncture (as it appears in
hindsight) that is also a vantage point for viewing the subsequent orientation of art practice
in the wake of the “eccentric” positions they once occupied on the Indian scene.
The intransigent abstraction that is Mohamedi’s bequest set the bar very high and not many
artists have had the spiritual ambition or formal discipline to follow in her tracks. (The
notable exception is the work of Prabhavathi Meppayil.) Khakhar’s “descendance” is rather
more multifarious and multigenerational: Atul Dodiya (b.1959), N.S.Harsha (b.1969), Jitish

Kallat (b.1974) are the names that come to mind. The hybridity and heterogeneity (of style
and subject matter) evinced by some of their early work looks back to Khakhar’s example,
just as the street-level view of contemporary India to which they were drawn is another facet
of the older painter’s legacy. In their individual (and very un-programmatic) ways they
sought to convey the impression of what reality looks like as representation, whether the
reality in question was mediated by the photographic lens, as in Dodiya’s paintings of the late
1980s after photographs of a nondescript provincial hinterland in Gujarat, or by “found”
material – newspaper photographs, images on the internet – as in Kallat’s pictorial templates
of the human flotsam and urban maelstrom of Bombay from the mid-1990s. The emphatic
frontality of Kallat’s pictures offers a contrast with the grid-like structure that Harsha
adopted as a representational device for the playful inventorial impulse underlying his
delicate delineation of human “types” in his paintings from 2000 onwards. The myriad
vignettes drawn from everyday incidents (however commonplace or incongruous) are
marvellously evocative of the life-rhythms of a place where the bucolic is (still) not more
than a stone’s throw from the urban: this is Harsha’s Mysore, so different from the Bombay
of Bollywood that Dodiya would go on to buoyantly allegorize in his pictorial montages of
the image-world of popular culture or from the Bombay of the “bare life”, the megalopolis
of the dispossessed – the urchins, child labourers, migrant workers, pavement dwellers –
foregrounded in Kallat’s paintings. What is salient in these diverse bodies of work is not
only the presence of the human figure but the sense or spirit of a place, a location, an
environment, a little ‘world’ within the larger one. Sosa Joseph’s Mattancherry is such a
microcosm, just as Baroda, or the generic Indian town for which it came to stand in his work,
was the privileged scene of representation for Khakhar.
She was a student at the faculty of fine arts in Baroda at a time when the leading painter of
the day was the sly genius of the place. Joseph admired his work but it was when she began
to come into her own as an artist (from around 2009) that the idiosyncrasies of Khakhar’s
pictorial language became discernible as formative for the mode of depiction she was
evolving. Born in 1971, Joseph came of age as a painter in India at a moment when figurative
art did not require any special pleading, given its so-called comeback under the
postmodernist dispensation. At the same time, painting as such was but one medium
among other forms of art practice, notably installation, the portmanteau term that
designates one consequence of the desire to go beyond the pictorial (or sculptural) frame
and is a refutation, therefore, of the very idea of medium specificity. But artists who were
indifferent to, or not tempted by, the “expanded field” could, however, continue to draw
upon the exemplars of painting of the recent past for instruction and inspiration, and the
key example at hand was the work of Khakhar, the least doctrinaire of painters. There were,
of course, other artists from rather different horizons that she would come to admire during
the time she spent in Baroda, enriching as the sojourn was in the education in pictorial taste
and sensibility not to mention the welcome change it afforded from the small town in Kerala
where she was born and had grown up. And yet the return to her native ground proved to be
a homecoming in pictorial terms in that the particular flavour of its social climate would
henceforth provide her painting with its principal subject. The distinctive quality of the place
is indissociable from its richly sedimented history, not only Kochi, famous as a trading port
for spices from the 14th century onwards and colonized successively by the Portuguese, the
Dutch and the British, but the populous enclave within it that epitomizes the complex

cultural mix of its inhabitants: Mattancherry, home to Muslims, Christians, Hindus and Jews,
and the neighbourhood in which Sosa Joseph lives and works.
What Are We?, the collective title of three large panoramic paintings made in 2012 would
appear to directly allude to this social cross section, its interrogatory postulate seeming to
touch upon a question of identity in that the vestimentary code of the female figures
thronging the picture plane in each of these works marks them out as belonging to the
Muslim community. But whose identity and in relation to whose alterity in a situation where
the adjacency and intermingling of people of different faiths is a matter of daily commerce in
the public space? When queried about the nature of the subject Joseph simply states that
the women shown milling about in the street live in the Muslim quarter of the town. Two of
the pictures depict them as going about their daily business, making their way in the
bedraggled ground, amidst the usual livestock that has a free run of the desultory place,
pausing to gossip or buy provisions even as they cradle an infant or tug at an unruly child … In
other words, the pedestrian commotion of street-life that Joseph herself confronts each
time she steps out of her studio, located as it is in an old, weather-beaten Dutch colonial
warehouse in the vicinity of the spice merchants and the historic synagogue in what is still
referred to as “Jew Town”. The air of the place is laced with the scent of spice and it is this
whiff that seems to have caught Salman Rushdie’s erotic fancy when he set a portentous
scene of seduction and ravishment in an entrepôt piled with jute sacks bursting with pepper
in his novel The Moor’s Last Sigh. The piquancy of Joseph’s paintings, needless to say, has
a different flavour.
In What Are We? (1), the women are lined up frontally as if they were posing for a
photograph, as the camera in the foreground – fixed on a tripod amidst the litter of all
manner of discarded things (umbrella, suitcase, slipper, rope, metal pipes, wooden poles) –
would appear to signal. But the position of the lens, however askew, is manifestly pointed
towards us, the viewers of the painting in which these figures have been immobilized in a
ceremonial of representation, as if we were the object of their collective gaze. The relation
between viewer and the viewed is thus slyly unsettled, suggesting an element of ruse in what
appears at first sight to be the artlessness of Joseph’s pictorial language. The seeming “faux
naif” style, however, is really a foil for a form of representational shorthand for treating each
element in the painting as if it were potentially a micro-vignette in a larger scheme, a tiny
incident whose apparent inconsequence is paradoxically what makes it momentarily and
locally momentous. Joseph’s pictures are aggregations of such offhand moments and
details depicted in a somewhat summary and succinct way, physiognomic traits reduced to a
caricatural tic or quirk registered by a pictorial handling that is appropriately notational in its
compact expressivity. The deadpan summation of these micro-episodes accentuates the
slightly edgy, almost mordant wit underlying her vision of the sheer randomness of the
quotidian drift, the purposiveness without purpose of the figures that people these
paintings. The horizontal span of the picture plane is thus entirely appropriate to the
inclusiveness of the social scene that Joseph wishes to encompass, including the snake
slithering in the foreground: painting in a panoramic format doesn’t need to resort to
anamorphism to register such details, unlike cinemascope, [which] “isn’t for human beings”,
as Fritz Lang famously quipped in a scene from Godard’s Contempt, “it’s for snakes and

funerals”. In Joseph’s painting the female figures, despite their black attire, are not attending
a funeral or a wake but are ostensibly part of a photographic séance, however embalmed
they will become as image once they have been captured by the lens.
But what if “What are We?” is a question that the women ask of themselves or is asked by the
painter on their behalf? The unstated (potentially) feminist premiss of the query suggests
another angle to the recurrence of female figures in Joseph’s work, and not only in relation to
those depicted as belonging to a religious minority – whether Muslim or Christian – but the
Hindu majority, too, in the light of the matrilineal system to which it had adhered and whose
repeal by legal decree in 1925 “normalized” the chauvinism that had once been something of
an exception in Kerala and not the rule as in other parts of the country. Joseph is too delicate
to broach the subject frontally, but she is hardly indifferent to the business as usual according
to which men dictate and women submit that prevails even in a state that has had a record
run of democratically elected communist governments over several decades and prides
itself on its high level of literacy. Moreover, when the paintings are seen in a wider national
context of the current political situation in India, dominated as it is by ferocious ideologues
of Hindu supremacy and the insidious climate of fear created by the violent attacks to
which religious minorities and dalits and those defending the secular values enshrined in
the Constitution have been increasingly subject, Joseph’s representations of Muslim or
Christian folk going about their individual and collective lives as observed in her home town
acquire a rather different resonance.
In yet another register, the title – what Duchamp called “the invisible colour” of the work –
and the panoramic formats of the three paintings cannot but recall an iconic art historical
precedent, Gauguin’s famous mural-like pictorial manifesto of life that was also his ode to
cultural alterity: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897-98).
Stylistically, of course, there is nothing Gauguinesque about Joseph’s handling any more
than the microcosm of a community in Mattancherry depicted by her has anything in
common with the idyll in the South Seas, his Edenic vision of otherness, projected by the
self-styled outcast of European civilization. And yet the existential tenor of the question that
is the “invisible colour” of Joseph’s set of paintings finds a distant echo in the allegorizing
title that Gauguin inscribed on the surface of his masterpiece, marking as it does the
inaugural modernist moment of such existentialist interrogations. Thirty years after his
death (in 1903), Gauguin’s representations of the non-European body would prove to be
exemplary for another artist in quest of her identity as a painter, and the itinerary of the
journey that Amrita Sher-Gil undertook in her discovery of Indian art led her from Ajanta and
Ellora to Mattancherry and the famous seventeenth-century frescoes in its palace. These
visual narratives of episodes from the Hindu epics are notable for their robust and ebullient
depictions of erotic appetite. Sher-Gil found the voluminous forms of the women ‘curiously
Rubenesque’ and she enthused over the vigour and plasticity of the drawing and the ‘rich
but subdued’ colour scheme. She was connecting with a part of her Indian heritage that had
hitherto been occluded by her training in the conventions of the western tradition of oil
painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. For someone like Joseph who has spent all her
working life as an artist within walking distance of the building housing these frescoes, the
lessons they offer of “an art in the image of people” might well have struck her as relevant

to her own pictorial concerns without being an object of emulation. The insider’s view that is
hers allows, paradoxically, for a certain distance from what is culturally most proximate,
whereas the Western painting to which she is drawn but has had little exposure at first hand
is very much part of her mental universe. Sher-Gil’s ambition to be the first truly modern
Indian painter perhaps necessarily entailed a form of aesthetic syncretism, given her selfconsciousness
about being a divided subject. And modern painting worth its name needed
to transcend academic conventions, often by way of an assimilation or appropriation of
elements from representational idioms or languages at the antipodes of the Western
tradition, whether these were qualified as archaic, folk, tribal, courtly, artisanal or vernacular.
Gauguin’s version of modernist primitivism paved the way for Sher-Gil’s reckoning with an
otherness that was part of her own Indo-European lineage, but there was nothing primitive
about the Indian art that galvanized her efforts to find a personal language appropriate to
representing “the life of the Indian poor” which she had declared to be her principal subject.
Joseph’s pictorial endeavour is not burdened by the civilizational dilemmas faced by her
great predecessor; born thirty years after Sher-Gil’s death, she can assume the legacy of
a certain modernity without being detained by the issue of its hybridity when she begins
to come of age as a painter from around 2009. Indeed, her own pictorial syntax could
be described as hybrid, albeit the elements that compose it resist being itemized. The
eclecticism of her stylistic references makes for a certain plastic mutability in terms of the
handling: the style does not show its (art historical) hand, and were we to qualify it as broadly
expressionistic it would be in the sense of a certain controlled looseness of the brush strokes,
accomplishing the depictive tasks with what could be characterized as a mixture of
concision and fluidity, pointedness and a seeming casualness. (These features are especially
salient in Joseph’s sketches in gouache where the erraticism of the rapidly brushed in
notations is entirely appropriate to the quick witted summing up of the vignette or motif in
question.). The paint describes shapes and then slips into shapelessness, and this pictorial
evasiveness – the mutational aspect of the relation between figure and ground, the absence
of perspective, the muffled palette, the curious aquarelle-like insubstantiality of the surface
and the livid highlights – is what contributes to the open-endedness of the signifying field.
Where Are We Going?, the title of a painting made in 2015 has a Gauguinesque resonance
too, and the Christian procession it depicts sets one thinking of the calvaries and other
configurations of pietistic fervour that Gauguin painted in Brittany before his flight to
more tropical climes. Joseph proposes a Syrian Christian version (the denomination that is
dominant in Kerala) of such an open-air ceremonial, which is not to suggest that she had
Gauguin in mind any more than the Ensor who painted the carnivalesque Christ’s Entry into
Brussels in 1889. But the slightly anarchic atmosphere of Joseph’s painting does bring to
mind the manic mood of the eccentric Belgian’s magnum opus, but not his virulent vision of
humanity. Joseph’s brush can have a burlesque edge but it is not overly caustic; her sense of
the absurd is rather elliptical and is often occasioned by the ways in which the ordinary and
the bizarre, the humdrum and the incongruous continually rub shoulders in the “spectacle”
of life that is the Indian street. So in Where Are We Going? the progress of the holy sacrament
led by the white robed priests bearing the monstrance appears to be momentarily halted
by the irruption of a mad woman looming in their way, naked and arms akimbo, and by
the tumult of the motley passers-by confronting this profane apparition in their midst. In
Joseph’s paintings the focus frequently deflects from the main “action” to all manner of

seemingly sundry and incidental and sometimes outlandish occurrences around it, so that
the cumulative effect of these multiple solicitations is a dispersal of the gaze across the
picture plane. (Isn’t such digressiveness a singular trait of Breughel’s rural market scenes or
of L.S. Lowry’s vision of street life in industrial Manchester or of Benode Behari Mukherjee’s
mural in Santiniketan depicting the lives of the medieval Indian saints, not to mention
the manifold narrative strands encompassed in the pictorial space of Islamic and Indian
miniature painting?). In some of her works the central area of the canvas that initially retains
the eye of the beholder is revealed to be an elusive cynosure in view of the encircling
vignettes that compete for attention with it. The circularity of the signifying round is akin to
that of a mandala — the spherical diagram that also denotes a community, an environment,
the very subject of Joseph’s paintings. Mattancherry mandala! The Sanskrit word is hardly
recondite when applied to works whose iconographical details are signalled as Christian or
Muslim, given the cultural syncretism that is such a vibrant aspect of the painter’s life-world.
It is this mixture and merger that Joseph observes with bemusement and a degree of malice,
casting an ironic eye on the disorderly pageant that unfolds in the public space, the arena
where a panoply of social “types” congregate, argue, gape, loiter, vociferate, go on
processions on feast days or on protest marches to defend a cause, get jostled, become
animated, stand still. Other Colours, indeed, as the title of a painting from 2015 has it, “local
colour”, as it were, but hardly the picturesqueness in which poverty clothes itself in the eyes
of the passing tourist and not only the vivid note struck by the red habits of the nuns amidst
the rabble, either. In other words, What Must Be Said (2015), according to the title of another
painting, that is to say, what the painter felt must be depicted: ostensibly a collective
manifestation of personal agency in the form of a public demonstration, with women very
much to the fore. As for what it is that must be said, this remains Unspecified (2013), to
borrow the title of yet another painting, or, even more bafflingly, It Seems (2015). Hard to
deduce from the “invisible colours” of all these works that they allude to moments and
incidents in a place called Mattancherry! Joseph’s titles are a tease, they suggest a play of
meanings but not a dénouement, and this is in keeping with her predilection for a form of
pictorial narrativity that never freezes into a narrative. She is interested in the quicksilver of
the signifier rather than the metallic substrate of the signified.
Irul (The Dark) (2015) is a painting that is as enigmatic as its title, a moonlit nocturne
strangely intimate in mood in view of the public place and the people who crowd it. Joseph
describes them as belonging to the underworld of petty crime, thieves and small time thugs,
and beggars and pavement dwellers, too, some of them maimed. They huddle in the gloom,
these shades, apparitional forms in the murky light. The somewhat oneiric ambiance marks
the work as unusual, as if the darkness has hushed the usual commotion of the day. Sleep has
claimed some of the spectral figures, others are still up, occupied in various menial or
obscure activities, the moon is reflected in the windshield of a parked lorry, a somnambulistic
seeming young man dimly familiar from a painting by Picasso in his “Blue Period”, as
phantom-like as the statue of the erstwhile Maharaja of Kochi on a pedestal. I wouldn’t have
known this had Joseph not told me, and sent me a photograph of the stony personage. So
the “dreamscape” is in fact concretely anchored in a local landmark in the light of what we
know but one wouldn’t have an inkling from the painting itself, and therein lies a clue to the
poetics of transposition of the real in Joseph’s work. The statue presides over the place, its
shadowy presence a foil to the standing couple who share a moment of tenderness at the

pictorial centre. The man’s eyes are closed as he clasps the woman, his hand closes on hers,
and one notices his feet, not because they are bare but because they are misshapen: the
truth of Joseph’s eye for the real is in the detail of this deformity. The painting depicts a
quietly beatific moment in the prevailing subfusc. Is that why the brush marks on either side
of the couple are evocative of wings?
The intimacy of the “core event” in this outdoor scene is the more striking in view of a certain
isolation of the figures when depicted in the interior spaces of a dwelling. The indoors are
usually pictured as a female domain, rooms in which the womenfolk of the household gather.
They sit on chairs or squat on the floor, these matriarchs and daughters and sisters, but the
relations between them appear to be restrained, as if to be together were the occasions of a
shared solitude. (Interior Figures, 2015). (The psychic seclusion or solitariness of women has
been variously treated by Amrita Sher-Gil, Arpita Singh, Nilima Sheikh and Nalini Malani, to
name only the Indian painters – all women, unsurprisingly – who are Joseph’s precursors in
this vein.). Their gazes are withdrawn, their faces a smudge, made all the more mask-like by
the summary brushwork, as if the very nature of the handling were an index of their effaced
lives. The figures are not individualised in psychological terms any more than are the interiors
in which they appear to be marooned (Waits, 2015). But they are personalized as “types”
which does not, however, make them type cast. Joseph has discovered for herself the ways
in which “caricature”, that recurrent tic of modern art if not its besetting trope, can be telling
of character. (Family Figures, 2013). The caricatural impulse – the succinct delineation of a
visage, the deftly rendered trait, the formal simplification or deformation – has a comic edge
but it can also shade into something more melancholic; the pictorial language registers
these mixed moods and is the more complex for it. (The “human comedy” of Joseph’s work
extends to the droll object-life of loudspeakers, light bulbs, umbrellas and other sundry
or nondescript items that thicken the texture of the everyday even as they signal the
contemporaneity of the real.) The women she depicts might well betoken the alienation that
comes from having interiorized the submission to a certain social order but the slight febrility
of the paint handling also suggests the painter’s impatience with their condition. If the
women appear to be sunk in torpor, as if waiting to be bestirred from the stasis, the style is
rather more brisk, animated, sharp, verging on the brusque in its terseness. There is nothing
very precious about Joseph’s treatment of “the feminine condition”. The Young Mother
(2015) standing behind her faceless infant faces us with a distinct squint in her eyes.
The situation tends to become tense when a male makes an appearance, as in the deranged
gesture of the father figure grasping a child’s doll by its neck as if he were about to wring it.
(Episode, 2015). His counterpart and opposite is Avatar (2015), a sardonic image of a species
of “holy man” from the look of it, benignly unctuous in the benediction he seems to offer
with his raised hand even as the other hand holds up a mirror. But the reflection in the pane
is empty, a blur. And some of the female figures have overcome their passivity, albeit in
situations that seem extreme: the kneeling woman in Moulded (2015), throwing up her arms
in a gesture that is a clear allusion to the man in front of a firing squad in Goya’s great painting
The Third of May 1808. The pointed art historical allusion is doubtless appropriate to the
direness of the situation that Joseph felt compelled to address and while expressing her
admiration for the Spanish master is hardly an exercise in playful quotation that has been

routinized by the pastiche and parody indulged in by one kind of postmodernist painting.
A case in point is Dancer (2016), where the variously attired girls lined up to take a bow are
led by a figure whose pose unmistakably recalls one of Degas’s famous ballerinas. Indeed
the cortege includes dancers with more than a passing resemblance to Goya’s majas (the
black mantilla) or to the women from the hills and the plains of the Punjab who posed for
Sher-Gil. But the references are worn lightly: a homage in passing, a bow to some of the
painters in her personal pantheon. They are a kind of cultural graft, as if in projecting images
that she admires on the female subjects of her painting, Joseph was also envisioning an
emancipatory context for them. Sher-Gil had been beguiled by the Kathakali dance she
discovered in Kochi, the European in her describing it as “grotesque yet subtle”. Joseph
returns the compliment, as it were, but in terms of an opposite cultural trajectory, one that
brings Goya, Degas and company to her home ground, her pictorial world.
In striving to represent the life that unfolds around her, Joseph is present, first and foremost,
to the language which she has deemed best for this task, that is to say, to the reality of
picture making, without which there can be no picturing of reality worth its name. Is that why
the facture of her paintings – the particular “washed” quality of the surface, the colour that
appears by turns rinsed and slightly murky, its translucence closer to aquarelle than oil paint,
the patches of paint that demarcate arbitrary pockets of space even as they contribute to the
overall piebald effect – invites itself to be seen as intransitive, without object, at the same
time as it is revealed to be fully responsive to the work of representation? The pictures make
salient the passage between these two modalities, their continual crossing. The subjective
and objective dimensions are inextricable in the manner of the flavours infusing the dish
typical of Kerala cuisine, fish cooked in a clay pot, or Meenchatti (2013), the piquant motif
of a sequence of still lives. In Joseph’s work, the paint describes and then deviates from
description as part of the same movement and momentum, with the same élan, as in the
coconut tree, soaring and solitary, its base littered with urban detritus but the sinuous shape
of its trunk silhouetted against a nimbus of white pigment: Otta (2013-14), as the title has
it, the word in Malayalam that means “all alone”. “A coconut tree has no branches”, Joseph
remarks. “While I was painting it, I somehow felt that I was doing my self-portrait”.
Deepak Ananth
September 2017
Deepak Ananth is an art historian based in Paris. He teaches at the École Supérieure d’Arts et Médias in Caen,
Normandy. He has written on a range of modern and contemporary European and Indian artists, mostly for
museum publications. His curatorial projects include exhibitions of contemporary and 19th-century French
art, Surrealism, the drawings of Roland Barthes, the place of India in the Western imagination (Indomania,
2013 at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels) and exhibitions of contemporary Indian art, notably Indian
Summer at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris in 2005. His current projects include a book on contemporary
Indian art, (Reaktion Books, London) and a monograph on the sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee. He is the curator
of a major survey show of Vivan Sundaram at the Haus der Kunst in Munich in the summer of 2018.

It Seems, 2015, oil on canvas, 183 × 152.5 cm / 72 × 60 in

Residual, 2013, oil on canvas, 92 × 122 cm / 36 × 48 in

What Are We? I, 2012, oil on canvas, 146 × 365.7 cm / 57.5 × 144 in

Young Mother, 2015, oil on canvas, 45.7 × 35.5 cm / 18 × 14 in

Waits, 2014, oil on canvas, 81 × 61 cm / 31 .8 × 24 in

Other Colours, 2013, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 183 cm / 60 × 72 in (diptych)

Avatar, 2015, oil on canvas, 25.4 × 33 cm / 10 × 13 in

What Must Be Said, 2015, oil on canvas, 125.7 × 359.4 cm / 49.5 × 141.5 in

Unspecified, 2013, oil on canvas, 92 × 122 cm / 36 × 48 in

Over There, 2016, oil on canvas, 178 × 244.7 cm / 70 × 96.3 in

I
IV
Meenchatti I – VI, 2013, oil on canvas, 40.6 × 30.4 cm / 16 × 12 in (each)

II
III
V
VI

Morikuni, 2016-17, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 304.8 cm / 60 × 120 in

I
Drawing I – III, 2017, watercolour on paper, 20.3 × 30.5 cm / 8 × 12 in (each)

II
III

Family Figures, 2013, oil on canvas, 60.5 × 100 cm / 23.8 × 39.3 in

Dancer, 2016, oil on canvas, 226 × 147.3 cm / 89 × 58 in

Waits, 2013, oil on canvas, 92 × 122 cm / 36 × 48 in

I
Object Lesson I – III, 2009, oil on canvas, 30 × 40 cm / 11.8 × 15.7 in (each)

II
III

What Are We? II, 2012, oil on canvas, 149.8 × 370.8 cm / 59 × 146 in

Moulded, 2015, oil on canvas, 92 × 122 cm / 36 × 48 in

Interior Figures, 2015, oil on canvas, 92 × 152.5 cm / 36 × 60 in

Otta, 2013, oil on canvas, 365.7 × 122 cm / 144 × 48 in (diptych)

Episode, 2015, oil on canvas, 92 × 122 cm / 36 × 48 in

Where Are We Going?, 2015, oil on canvas, 183 × 152.5 cm / 72 × 60 in

Irul (The Dark), 2015, oil on canvas, 183 × 152.5 cm / 72 × 60 in

What Are We? III, 2012, oil on canvas, 149.8 × 370.8 cm / 59 × 146 in

Sosa Joseph, 2013

Sosa Joseph
Born 1971 in Kerala, India
Diploma in Painting, Raja Ravi Varma College of Fine Arts, Kerala
Post-Graduate Diploma in Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, Baroda
Lives and works in Kochi
Solo Exhibitions
2017 India Art Fair (presented by Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke), New Delhi
2016 ‘What Are We?’, Setouchi Triennale, Shodoshima Island, Japan
2014 ‘Unspecified’, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai
2009 ‘The Common’, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai
2005 ‘Tenacity of the Moon’, Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi
Selected Group Exhibitions
2017 ‘Mattancherry’, curated by Riyas Komu, URU Art Harbour, Kochi
2016 ‘DWELLING: 10th Anniversary Show’, curated by Ranjit Hoskote, Galerie
Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai
2015 ‘Kamarado’, curated by Zasha Colah, Sumesh Sharma, Jelle Bouwhuis and Kerstin
Winking, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and Clark House Initiative Bombay
2015 ‘Double Take’, curated by Diana Campbell, Nature Morte, New Delhi
2012 First edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, curated by Bose Krishnamachari and
Riyas Komu, Kochi
2011 ‘5th Anniversary Exhibition’, Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke, Mumbai
2007 ‘Panchatantra’, Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi
2006 ‘Intimate Revelations’, Schneider Museum of Art, Oregon, USA
2006 ‘Open-Eyed Dreams’, Durbar Hall Art Centre, Kochi
2003 ‘Remembering Bhupen’, Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi
Residencies
2016 Setouchi Triennale Residency, Shodoshima Island, Japan
2015 Global Collaborations Program, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam,
The Netherlands

Essay
Deepak Ananth
Photography
Anil Rane
Printing
Prodon Enterprises
© Sosa Joseph and Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke
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Behind Taj Mahal Hotel, Colaba, Mumbai 400 001, India
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