Mattancherry Mix, 2018

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.