The exhibition Magic Markers features paintings and drawings by six outstanding mid-career artists as a tribute to mark making, which has seen a resurgence in recent years. It is the latest comeback of a form that is constantly said to be dead or dying. Claims for painting’s imminent demise have fallen into three categories: technological, historical and ideological.
Technological: If Artificial Intelligence is the latest existential threat to mark making, photography was the first. Back in 1840, on viewing an early daguerreotype, the French painter Paul Delaroche exclaimed, “From today, painting is dead"!
Historical: At some point in the modern era, art history adopted the idea of progress. The most influential story of progress went like this: Painting is a journey of discovering the inherent qualities of the medium itself. It began with the invention of single point perspective and reached a major milestone with its eventual rejection. The journey ended in the mid-twentieth century with colour field painting and minimalism. At that point, everything that painting could achieve had been achieved, and everything that could be expressed by applying pigment to a few square feet of canvas or paper had already been expressed.
Ideological: At the turn of the millennium, an influential faction of theorists argued that mark making was inextricably tied to neo-liberal capitalism through its celebration of individual creativity and its valorisation of the lone artistic genius. These theorists held up non-painterly media and collectivism as bulwarks against the market, resulting in painting being disfavoured in biennales and major group exhibitions that had become a crucial contributor to artists’ reputations.
None of these theories was completely misguided. Photography did induce a radical redefinition of the purpose of painting. The rich history of the form does leave very little room for new discoveries. And painting is the most market-friendly of visual art forms.
But what these propositions ignored was at least equally important. They failed to understand the sheer complexity of interactions between brain, hand, pigment and picture surface that continue to prove an enormous challenge to technologies of replication. They gave insufficient heed to traditions of art independent of their grand narrative, less concerned with radical breakthroughs in form. And they were wilfully blind to the fact that intrinsically collective efforts like film-making could be thoroughly market-driven, while lone artists could work in relative autonomy from the market, steering clear of the clichés of decorative style.
The pandemic underlined virtues of mark making often ignored, especially what it enables with an economy of means. Students developed their painterly practice without distraction and many artists who had worked in alternate media rediscovered the joy of painting.
Among these was Manish Nai, who made no conventional paintings for two decades after graduating from art school. Drawn to abstraction from an early age, he discovered ways of extending the form through the use of jute, cardboard, and aluminium among other materials. Starting in the period of lockdowns and curfews, he produced a large suite of watercolours on paper, six of which feature in Magic Markers.
Sahej Rahal’s practice reaches out even wider than Nai’s, encompassing performance, video and digital animation. Across all mediums, he combines the primitivistic with the futuristic, archaeology with science fiction. Magic Markers presents a small selection of wondrous birds and beasts from the menagerie of his imagination.
T. Venkanna is a prolific artist and virtuoso draftsman equally comfortable making massive canvases and small, delicate works on paper. He explores the nature of sexuality and the changed relationship with the natural world in societies saturated by pornography and consumerism.
Amitesh Shrivastava’s paintings are both deeply complex and amusingly quirky. They are often triggered by a specific experience but, once he puts brush directly to canvas, he builds the picture surface organically without a preconceived plan, playing with tones and textures in a manner that exemplifies the magic of mark making.
The practice of Parag Sonarghare, in contrast, is all about careful planning and studied execution. His central preoccupation is the Indian male form, a woefully under-explored subject in art. While he approaches his task like a clinician, he does so with empathy, endowing his subjects with a dignity some are denied in their daily lives.
Aditi Singh’s meditative compositions are abstract but echo natural forms, flowers or landscapes. She has developed a profound understanding of the way ink is absorbed by different kinds of paper or settles on the surface, enabling her to manipulate density and flow, achieving fascinatingly immersive images through the process.
Beyond asserting the continuing value of mark making, the exhibition calls attention to the obsolescence of once-fervid battles supporting one medium over another, or figuration over abstraction, or vice versa. Instead, it advocates for an art that can speak for itself without need for an ideological buttress to those able and willing to listen.
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