Abstract Recensions

Recent Works of Niti Jain

“It struck me one day that it was more interesting to think of modernism as a graph or table than as history…(…the history of an ever more abstract and abstracting opticality), that there was something to be gained from exploring its logic as a topography rather than following the threads of it as a narrative….”

Rosalind Krauss

“Diako — African-born French artist displaying a selection of both abstract and contemporary paintings online.”

Linkism-Art Directory through Google

This comment about Diako, a Cameroon artist on the website, arrested my attention as I browsed through the internet searching for contemporary abstract artists. The manner in which this neat divide between abstract and contemporary art was carried out was scandalous! Is abstract art a relic of obsolete modernism and therefore banished from contemporary landscape of art? Is abstraction the ‘other’ of contemporary art?

This false binary between abstraction and contemporary art grossly misrepresents the contemporary art world. Not only has abstraction made a worldwide comeback, mainly in Australia, Canada, the United States and Europe, but offers itself as a meaningful alternative to our mediascape, which is dominated by images, narrative and news. In a world ruled by means-end rationality and instrumental reason, abstraction lends itself to a variety of new functions that contemporary times have ascribed to it: a way to create a new-age spirituality, as for instance, in Marilyn Kirsch’s Transcendental Minimalism or a new language of formal topography with a built-in criticality towards urban detritus and environmental degradation, as in the works of the Canadian, Christian McLeod. Abstraction is certainly not a trend of the past, but that which is fast growing in significance and visual appeal — almost a “cool” style, attracting the upwardly mobile with a taste for the chic. Visit any international art fair or biennale, there are bound to be eye-catching corners that proudly display neo-abstraction in the form of geometric shapes in dazzling colors, where minute attention is paid to the two-dimensional surface.

Niti Jain’s canvases are far too dense with gravitas and tied far too deeply with the artist’s existential dilemmas and philosophical doubts to fit into the category of the ‘cool abstract’. She is a painter who stands on her own, totally secure in her own skin and her decision to side with abstraction. Not duped by the art-world making a fetish of the trendy and confusing the new with the important, she not only embraces abstraction with a profound conviction Her colossal canvasses offer you not just transcendental meditation but a phenomenal experience through their sheer physical scale and theatrical interplay of colours. The knobby or uneven surface almost takes the eyes on a bumpy ride across the canvas, almost translating the visual impact into a kinesthetic journey.

Seldom do paintings assail you with their visual presence the way Niti’s large canvases overwhelmed my senses when I first walked into her studio. Abstraction in 20th Century western art had defined the very ethos of modernism, well into 1950s abstract expressionism with Mark Rothko and Barnett Neumann’s colour fields arousing a sublime and contemplative reverence. Postmodernism has restituted the figurative and narrative via the allegorical without fully turning its back on abstraction, which is why Julian Schnabel could overlay broken crockery over explosive narratives or Gerhard Richter could bring abstraction into the heart of photographic images through blurring.

Abstraction in modern Indian art

It is often believed that abstraction and conceptual art failed to strike deep roots in 20th Century Indian art and Indian imagery predictably gravitated towards the figurative. Pure abstractionists, who have steered clear of the figurative, are a rarity. Laxman Shreshtha and Prabhakar Kolte are exceptions to the rule. Although Akbar Padamsee’s metascapes , however fictitious, belong to the recognizable genre of landscape painting and conjure up a possible world, it is the figurative that has emerged as an enduring matrix in the majority of trends in modern Indian art.

Perhaps this predilection for the recognizable, the narrative and the imagistic is peculiar to the Indian modern — a symptom of the colonial and postcolonial condition —just as academic realism, enshrined in colonial art schools, found its themes in stories from classical mythology, best exemplified by Ravi Varma’s oil paintings, which fully fitted the bill of the colonial imperative: Indian in subject matter and European in form. It is a different matter how such a move by Ravi Varma fortuitously sowed the seeds of cultural nationalism. On India gaining political sovereignty, the urge to tell stories took a modernist dimension when M F Hussain adapted the cubist vocabulary to narrate stories from the epics in his bid to appropriate western modernism. In the works of Nalini Malani, Vivan Sundaram, Ghulam Sheikh and Bhupen Khakhar, narrativity took a postcolonial turn as it opened up new vistas for the exploration of multiple stories unfolding across complex palimpsests of time and space. Since then, abstraction has sporadically hit the art scene, never really receding in importance. For a brief spell during the 1960s, it translated into a trend that received a strong indigenous stamp in the works of G R Santosh and Biren De. Their abstractions had as their frame of reference the Tantric iconography of mandalas and geometric diagrams.

Against the Grain: Nasreen Mohamedi and Gargi Raina

Our art schools impart training to young artists on the basis of their technical mastery over plausible representation. Any sign of interest in abstraction tends to be stifled as laziness and a facile alternative. It takes a certain audacity and deep conviction to tread the path of abstraction in such a situation. Wider exposure to art schools in the West at the right time could nudge young artists to opt for “the path less trodden”. Nasreen Mohamedi was one such artist, who very early in her career, declared her allegiance to abstraction on conceptualism. Her linear abstractions and monochromatic grids on a white surface were almost made in oblivion in the 1970s, when the dominant trend was a kind of figurative narration that had its epicenter in the Baroda Art School. But Nasreen continued working against the grain, driven by her conviction and passion for the ineffable and the allusive, which exceeded the plane of representation. Following on similar terrain, Gargi Raina moved along the interspaces between pure abstraction and literalism such that even the most austere linear diagram can find a counterpart in reality in her series “Constructing the Memory of a Room.”

What makes Niti Jain’s canvases different from that of her predecessors and contemporary abstract artists in India is her modality of working with coloured fields that create amorphous space and the intense visibility of her brush strokes. They do not have the precision of Nasreen’s gossamer web of dense lines or Gargi’s double-edged abstraction, but revel in the grey areas between colours in an infinite grading of tones and a sensuality of textures that protrude towards the viewer. Banishing representation, Niti builds up a drama of colours, layer by layer, until she reaches a point of saturation when either she declares the work complete or risks an extra stroke that might disrupt its formal balance. This could imply that she has to start all over again until chromatic equilibrium is restored, which is precisely the manner in which modernists in the past worked, from Cezanne, Matisse, Paul Klee to Mondrian.

Does this mean that while most contemporary artists move in the direction of installation art, digital imagery and post-production art, Niti Jain obstinately remains within the confines of easel painting, defying the dictum of the times? Not really. Abstract painting in oils and acrylics has made a recent comeback internationally, sometimes as a retro style of early modernism. Much more heterogeneous than its earlier manifestations in the works of Neumann and Rothko, this recent revival of abstraction opens itself to a wide range of appendages that are added from the real world — beads, threads, fabric, net, and so on.

Meditations on the Medium

However, Niti exercises a more formal restraint on herself, and no matter how experimental her application of colors may be, she cherishes a certain purity of the medium. This purity extends not only to colours and the medium, but to the pictorialism that lies at the basis of its aesthetics. Eschewing even an oblique reference to narratives, the color planes she creates conjure up a theatre of hues, strokes and textures. At times, the vertical and horizontal strokes almost seem to weave a textile of flat colours that display the favored modernist metaphor of a grid; often, it reappears as a chequered pattern that imbibes the quality of surreptitiously inscribed graffiti.

I find graffiti a useful trope to understand Niti’s canvases, even if they far exceed it in terms of their sophistication and formal complexity. This is to differentiate her works from the different ways in which abstraction has made a comeback in contemporary times, in trends ranging from abstractions that relate to urban reality and topography to those that veer towards minimalist decorativeness and chic patterns. Mark-making powerfully differentiates Niti’s style of painting, through which she develops an intimate and intense engagement with the surface. From broadly applied paint and rough crosshatching to her delicate final touches that bring about unexpected chromatic effects, her mark-making studiously avoids the intrusion of the representational. If one insists on reading nocturnal landscapes or surrealist apparitions in them, it is simply the by-product of the complex modality of layering and the onlooker’s predilection for reading the unfamiliar via the familiar.

Abstraction and the Body

Quite early in her career as an art student, the pedantic insistence on life study and still life — the backbone of art pedagogy inherited from colonial art schools — created in her a horror for figures and the need to produce countless studies of human figure from a variety of viewpoints and learn to make compositions out of multiple figures.

It was during her prolonged stint at the Slade, when she enrolled for a course, that she was exposed to another art pedagogy that did not enshrine the human figure as a point of departure.

Classes on experimental drawing drew her attention to the world of objects —chairs, tables, windows and boats — and expanded her horizon, giving her the freedom to play with scale. Rather than observing a model posing on a chair, the tutors encouraged the students to observe their own bodies, faces, hands and feet. Observing ones’ own hands and feet from very close has the effect of fragmenting the body into abstract patterns. This led her to experiencing her own body as a part of the world! Her move to abstraction was not the result of turning her back on the body, but channelizing through it to overcome it. Abstraction became a point of arrival after experiencing the limits of the finitude of the corporeal.

While this may have helped her to get over her fear of the genre of the figurative, she began to develop a distaste for what passed for fashionable postmodern trends in London galleries. Whether they were the works of the YBA, young British artists or radical feminist shows, their overt ideological agenda made Niti uneasy, just as the photorealism that was on the rise failed to inspire her. Feminism had shifted from the conceptual, as espoused by Mary Kelly a generation ago, to what seemed like crass foregrounding of pornography and female orgasm.

Amidst the clamour for the radical and rebellious, Niti’s decision to move against the tide seems a statement of independence and an assertion of calm self confidence. While abstraction marks her as different from the abstract expressionist celebrating the gestural, she cherishes accidents as part of creativity. In this respect, the term Tachism, with its dictionary definition “action painting in which random blotches of colour are used as a method of instinctive expression”, could apply to her method of painting. In the throes of her compulsion to append a title to a canvas, she admires early modernists such as Kandinsky, who devised impersonal serialized titles such as composition I, II, III, etc.

Does Niti side with the modernists in their eschewal of the literary and overtly political ideology? May be. Perhaps her paintings remain confined within the formal logic of modernism and revel in an autonomous domain of colors, lines and shapes. They inscribe the deeply personal and experiential, which materializes through the poetics of color and visual metaphors. Where she differs with the modernist idiom is in her discomfort with the signature. This creates a painterly problem for her — there never seems to be that perfect place for her to sign, which will resonate with her work and not detract from its visual efficacy! This perhaps best encapsulates her take on subjectivity — it is not about loudly proclaiming her uniqueness as an artist, but a quiet carving out of space for the personal, which accommodates the aesthetic and the anti-aesthetic. Not all her canvases celebrate beauty and harmony; there are some that create space for the discordant and the dissonant. On a largely harmonious assemblage of dark and somber-coloured shapes, a streak of jarring, chromium yellow or an iridescent blur of shocking pink sometimes bursts into our roving eyes and checks their linear progress! This formal ambiguity succeeds in not only adding an extra dimension and unpredictability to her magisterial canvases, but helps her to appropriate abstraction as a contemporary artist.

Parul Dave

Parul Dave Mukherji is a professor and teaches in the Department of Visual Studies at the School od Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her area od interest spans pre-modern Indian art and contemporary art and culture practices.