The Human Condition

By K B Goel

FEW artists these days have the capacity to surprise, perhaps because art has become a self-repeating enterprise. And those who do command instant attention because veneration of the new has by now become a historical response. This is true even when the new turns out to be an empty gesture. Indeed the new is the updated criteria of most recent art; it ensures immediate notice though it is hardly any guarantee of true merit. The new in a way has become synonymous with progress, the external condition of change. Imagine the hurt and insult an artist will feel if he is introduced as the maker of some yesterday’s dress! He may deny the quantum jump for his innovation. Saying that the new indeed is the renewal of a setting of the old. He has indeed good reasons to fear any violent changes in style or content of his painting because what is achieved through sudden upheaval is difficult to keep up. Only the new should suggest that it has arrived with some speed. After all art has to keep pace with its audience, specially when the buyer is fond of discussing art as an after-dinner piece of smart conversation.

Bela Gupta is an artist who is moved by the human condition and drawn to values outside art to examine them in art terms. Her art explores the irony - bordering on the absurd - of the human condition. The world of hunger and misery is juxtaposed against the hollow exuberance of modern society. And the two realms with all their glaring contrast fuse in her art.

Bela’s show at the IHC Gallery in New Delhi, which was on view couple of weeks ago, represents a quantum jump. To say so would be making room for high seriousness, a condition most unfavorable for art these days, since this cannot form part of teatime prattle on art; what is required is a judicious mixture of seriousness and frivolity — a necessary condition to be successful.

For this reason, she has cast her net wider in attempting to push out the frontiers of art on a public rather than private level. Intuitively, she has worked out a complex relationship between language and visual imagery. The glittering models of Victoria’s Secret are contrasted against emaciated bodies, warped by hunger and deprivation, which becomes a vehicle of expressing rage and pity as a manifestation of man’s inhumanity. The paintings thus become for Bela, a means of self-expression and they are not entirely illustrative in quality but have a definite pictorial merit.

In her recent paintings on show at the India Habitat Centre Gallery, she is involved with surrealistic metaphysics. For the surrealists, the state of mind is a built-in condition of the method of surrealism and it is more than mere effect, the surrealists rely on surprising effects of bringing incongruous objects together in unlikely situations. As an imagist, Bela employs the pictorial language of the surrealists. She uses photographs and images of mass culture made popular by Sunday glossies, the TV and the Internet. Her paintings are a direct comment on the human condition brought out by a purely visual experience.

If her images look like representation of things that belong to the visible world, it is a mere device, an aid to allow us to enter the power of the works themselves where significance of one image can be understood in relation to another image. The images and objects depict ideas behind them, their presence has no obvious meaning or reality, they express a deeper reality/meaning. A meaning that only a painting can express visually. An object has a mental reality and a physical reality. The mental reality is the virtual reality. This is really important because, reality—social reality, that is the raw material of Bela’s imagination.

All that is required of us while viewing her work is that we should seek meaning in the context of the images for her art is more of an inspired activity and thus to get at the true stuff is to go back to the gut response which the images create. They do transmit a certain feeling which we can share – a feeling of bitterness. The Dostoevskian perspectives and paradoxes are too pressingly alive in her work.

Art ceases to be merely an activity one associates with, like in Bela’s erlier works, metamorphosizing Cola cans into saleable art commodities. Art now means something higher than such activity, something closer to a religious experience, holding the possibility of release from suffering. Art of such magnitude cannot be a mere vibration inside a museum: such art involves us with moral questions. The artist has either to play the moral role, protest against the pretended innocence of a corrupt value-system, or quit doing art. Rather than quit painting, Bela has chosen art's essential role of shaping the consciousness. She chose to tell her story. The story of those lonely, solitary hours: the story of the night of long knives. And she thinks her narrative will influence the world. This seemingly ingenuous naivete is understandable: she has gone through hell pondering over injustices and inequalities all around. Her art has therefore acquired a quality of message that has overt political reference. Her art now appears to be closer to pop art, also to poster art, art with a message. Posters were used to express protest. They were bold, angry and schematized, a little exaggerated.

Although it should be added she has managed to keep her narrative acts free from the constraints of a style, painting in a manner that stylistic features do not become too loud. In the work on display at the IHC Gallery, what is sought to be communicated in this massive show is the violence, the moment itself forms the all-round viewpoint, captured in harsh, bright colours that make her work more expressive than most of her contemporaries.

The essence of her work in a way lies in brigding the gap between life and art by making us aware of the links between the artist and her universe via sensations: they are part of our environment and this is her theme and subject matter.

(source: KB Goel, Critical Writings on Art, 1957–1998. The Human Condition,
pgs 164-165)