Mattancherry Mix, 2018
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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 Their gazes are withdrawn, their faces a smudge, made all the more mask-like by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