BLACK AND WHITE IN THE HORIZON
Undoing Ontogeny
"The poem should not mean but be". - Archibald MacLeish, ‘Ars Poetica’.
Abstract Art as a notion has various verbal connotations and countless visual manifestations. In 'Black and White in the Horizon'; considering the compliance that the notion lends itself to is a compilation of a certain section of the contemporary Abstract art in India. The curator has chosen thirteen artists belonging to different age groups and backgrounds who, barring a couple of exceptions share a sensibility and the manifest lingual maneuvers that adheres to autonomy of art and asserts the very ontological status of an aesthetic object.
The reminiscence of Abstract art in the twenty-first century implies that abstraction is not necessarily confined to the Modernist agenda. The Formalists celebrated it the most but the meaning-free or non representational expression as a pure form of beauty is contemplated almost in every age in the history of art. Philosophers like Plato have stated it categorically and artists of different civilizations from time to time have willingly surrendered the representation for abstract presentation.
The Indian Aesthetic treatises like Chitrasutra of Vishnudharmottara, while pondering over the possible attainments of an artist opine that he, who can paint the fluttering and not only the flag or the heat and not only the flame is the real master. The preeminence of noumenon over phenomenon advocated through this statement and the resultant abstracting tendencies are recurrently reflected in the art practice of ancient and medieval India.
What is said about Romanticism could also be extended to Abstraction. Like Romanticism, Abstraction too is not merely a phase in the chronicle of art or just a manner of expression but is a way of experiencing the world around. Rather it has been identified as the quintessential ability of an artist by Aristotle while defending the position of Art and the artists against the Platonic allegation of mimesis. It is an ability of de-linking the matter from the form and sensation from cognition that saves art from being merely an imitation of the sensual world and to be a sovereign entity. ‘Black and White in the Horizon’ is a tribute to the sovereignty of Art.
Participating in ‘Black and White in the Horizon’ though divulging some apparent affinity with the Lyrical/Contemplative/Timeless abstractionists like Marc Rothko, Barnett Newman, Richard Diebenkorn or even our own Vasudeo Gaitonde, they have trodden different paths to reach their destinations. Like Piet Mondrian they too initiate their journey with the known world. They select a living organism or an object that stimulates their visual concerns but unlike Mondrian they do not necessarily adhere to ‘essentialising’ it into an image. Instead, they undo the elements that build up its identity, interestingly with varied intentions as stated by the artists themselves. The gadgets like cameras and computers that are employed by many of these artists to document the chosen object register their physicality with utmost details. These elements then are camouflaged using different devices as an attempt towards de-linking the pictorial from the real making the pictorial appear and behave independently from the real.
An organism or an object lives in certain corporeal environs incorporated with time and grows with it betraying certain determinism in the process. By de- contextualizing the pictorial from its material counterpart the artist puts a stop to the ontogenesis and the inevitable obliteration that the ‘real’ is cursed with.
