Mattancherry Mix, 2018

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