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