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Mattancherry Mix, 2018

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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

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