‘His Story’ by Hindol Brahmbhatt: Meditative yet visually dramatic

‘His Story’ is the title of a new series of works by Hindol Brahmbhatt on display at the New York based Tamaraind Art Gallery. His large-scale multimedia paintings or ‘painterly installations’ depict portraits of some great artists from the past.

Why has he opted to paint them and what do they stand for? Providing a clue to them, the curaorial note states:

“Famous artists throughout history depicted in speculative portraits are reduced to their vulnerable cores suggesting a critique on how a glorious past becomes a product’ of contemporary time. In this context, the images serve as incisive commentaries of perception and experience. Meditative yet visually dramatic, they allude to the unpredictable confluence of torched wood, etched text on plexiglass and oil on canvases.These large, contemplative works created in a unique and personal idiom reveal an acute awareness towards pushing Mediatic Realism to the next level.”

During his formative years, the artist was a witness to the contemporary art scene when Mediatic Realism seemed to be the norm among the Indian artists. He adapted his style to incorporate the mediatized images, but soon grasped how the same images could easily be employed with different techniques for developing a unique personal idiom.

Hindol Brahmbhatt’s practice hinges on his painterly style of constructing iconic imagery. The resultant mixed media works often blend different times and spaces as well as diverse elements from the various cultures, to present a mesmerizing and mystical milieu. They tend to traverse the narrative space of ubiquitous conventional realism wherein time, space and subjects that inhabit pictorial space combine to form a congruous whole.

To express the incongruity and resultant chaos is a formal device employed in his storytelling technique. The artist states:

“I believe in truth of opposites. For every argument, there is bound to be a counter argument that can be equally valid. I try recreating & relocating the known and the imagined visual references, filling them with alternative meanings.”