Exploring different facets, hues and shades of LOVE

A just concluded show, entitled ‘LOVE is a 4 Letter Word’ at LATITUDE 28 featured works by artists Bose Krishnamachari, Chintan Upadhyay, Chittrovanu Mazumdar, Manjunath Kamath and Sana Arjumand. Here are the excerpts from the curatorial note to the show:

“With the many promises associated with love as a mass cultural condition, the word is saturated with its own attending ironies and categorical imperatives. Reviling and irresistible, love is akin to a death drive that trembles on the boundaries of self-annihilation and absurdity.

Chintan Upadhyay’s sculpture of a baby’s head glows with a golden surface, punctuated by the inclusion of black motifs. The graffito covers a portion of the back of the head and a small target drawn on the center of the skull. The stylish sunglasses form a solid barrier that is not rose-tinted but a mechanism of blindness. In ‘Burning House’, smoldering embers go beyond consuming a house and incinerate the photograph, indicating a love that cannot be domesticated.

Bose Krishnamachari undermines the notion of love at first site by incorporating Braille in his work. How does love function without the sense of sight, and purely as a tactile sensuality? If vision plays a determining factor in creating attraction, what does one do without it? By presenting a work in this medium, he creates an experience where viewers who rely on sight are denied a singularly visual access to the work.

Chittrovanu Mazumdar’s paintings exude a protracted sense of longing, where violence and sensuality are chromatically intertwined. Red is the blood of love, possession and death all at once. By bisecting his canvases, and reframing the subject, the artist alludes to the subjective experience of passion which poetically engages the dark side. The point of a gun mirrors a pointer finger playfully entering a mouth.

Sana Arjumand considers love in the age of global media in her paintings entitled Politics of Love. ‘In Size Does Matter’, a pacified man is swept in a horrifying waltz with an anthropomorphic creature dressed in bridal attire. The artist suggests the dreamlike state which love induces, and its potentially blinding effects.

For Manjunath Kamath, love is culturally and temporally specific. As a concept, it changes with each historical moment, rather than existing as a reified absolute. This standardized ideal of ‘Love’, concocted and mass produced today, is the subject of Kamath’s critique in ‘Fake Love Story’.