‘In Search of a Narrative Idiom’ and a Sanjeev Khandekar solo at London’s Nehru Centre

Just as narrative gradually ceased to be a core theme for most modernist poets, so did streak of storytelling all but disappeared from modernist painting spectrum! Today, a number of factors though, most conspicuously the steady decline of the somewhat rigid modernist orthodoxy and the subsequent return to realism have both conspired to help in revival of narrative painting.

A two day exhibition that was just hosted at London’s Nehru Centre, featured some of the most noteworthy modern & contemporary artists from India, namely Paresh Maity, Thota Vaikuntum, Sakti Barman, Jayasri Burman, Laxma Goud and Anjolie Ela Menon. It made a strong attempt to return either in a roundabout fashion or directly to the great narrative tradition in painting.

The aim of this exhibition was to offer an alternative insight into visual narratives, which employs unconventional or unfamiliar compositions and structures. Its intention was not necessarily to formulate or arrive at a precise definition as to what exactly makes a work of narrative in nature.

It rather provided alternative ways to present a passage of time placed within a static medium and typified the potential of narrative painting. Nonetheless, the participating artists in this show shared, to differing degrees, certain common facets like space, setting, and a representation of figures related to the themes or events portrayed.

Another important exhibition at the Nehru Centre featured a series of acrylic paintings by poet-painter Sanjeev Khandekar. He here represents a magnificent montage of distorted images of the ticker tape that forms the nucleus of the market scene. To put it in his words: “I wish to distort the ticker just to squeeze it, to try out its abstraction, you might say but this is to understand the internalization of our obsession with money, power and ensuing consumerism.

“We all are just figures and numbers who walk in the human form in the finance world, or the figures in the paintings, ambulating in order to reach the point of gratification. But we’re not able to locate our destination as the market has unleashed the huge volume of our unconscious, a quiescent bundle of the suppressed desires.” In essence, the artist reminds the viewers of their enslavement to the market that we’ve subjected ourselves to.