Mattancherry Mix, 2018

Kallat (b.1974) are the names that come to mind. The hybridity and heterogeneity (of style
and subject matter) evinced by some of their early work looks back to Khakhar’s example,
just as the street-level view of contemporary India to which they were drawn is another facet
of the older painter’s legacy. In their individual (and very un-programmatic) ways they
sought to convey the impression of what reality looks like as representation, whether the
reality in question was mediated by the photographic lens, as in Dodiya’s paintings of the late
1980s after photographs of a nondescript provincial hinterland in Gujarat, or by “found”
material – newspaper photographs, images on the internet – as in Kallat’s pictorial templates
of the human flotsam and urban maelstrom of Bombay from the mid-1990s. The emphatic
frontality of Kallat’s pictures offers a contrast with the grid-like structure that Harsha
adopted as a representational device for the playful inventorial impulse underlying his
delicate delineation of human “types” in his paintings from 2000 onwards. The myriad
vignettes drawn from everyday incidents (however commonplace or incongruous) are
marvellously evocative of the life-rhythms of a place where the bucolic is (still) not more
than a stone’s throw from the urban: this is Harsha’s Mysore, so different from the Bombay
of Bollywood that Dodiya would go on to buoyantly allegorize in his pictorial montages of
the image-world of popular culture or from the Bombay of the “bare life”, the megalopolis
of the dispossessed – the urchins, child labourers, migrant workers, pavement dwellers –
foregrounded in Kallat’s paintings. What is salient in these diverse bodies of work is not
only the presence of the human figure but the sense or spirit of a place, a location, an
environment, a little ‘world’ within the larger one. Sosa Joseph’s Mattancherry is such a
microcosm, just as Baroda, or the generic Indian town for which it came to stand in his work,
was the privileged scene of representation for Khakhar.
She was a student at the faculty of fine arts in Baroda at a time when the leading painter of
the day was the sly genius of the place. Joseph admired his work but it was when she began
to come into her own as an artist (from around 2009) that the idiosyncrasies of Khakhar’s
pictorial language became discernible as formative for the mode of depiction she was
evolving. Born in 1971, Joseph came of age as a painter in India at a moment when figurative
art did not require any special pleading, given its so-called comeback under the
postmodernist dispensation. At the same time, painting as such was but one medium
among other forms of art practice, notably installation, the portmanteau term that
designates one consequence of the desire to go beyond the pictorial (or sculptural) frame
and is a refutation, therefore, of the very idea of medium specificity. But artists who were
indifferent to, or not tempted by, the “expanded field” could, however, continue to draw
upon the exemplars of painting of the recent past for instruction and inspiration, and the
key example at hand was the work of Khakhar, the least doctrinaire of painters. There were,
of course, other artists from rather different horizons that she would come to admire during
the time she spent in Baroda, enriching as the sojourn was in the education in pictorial taste
and sensibility not to mention the welcome change it afforded from the small town in Kerala
where she was born and had grown up. And yet the return to her native ground proved to be
a homecoming in pictorial terms in that the particular flavour of its social climate would
henceforth provide her painting with its principal subject. The distinctive quality of the place
is indissociable from its richly sedimented history, not only Kochi, famous as a trading port
for spices from the 14th century onwards and colonized successively by the Portuguese, the
Dutch and the British, but the populous enclave within it that epitomizes the complex