Scaffolding the Absent at the Guild Art, Mumbai

The Guild Art Gallery presents a solo exhibition by artist G.R. Iranna, entitled ‘Scaffolding the Absent’. A catalogue essay by critic/ curator Maya Kóvskaya reveals that this new collection large-scale works meditates on human mortality and the fragility of our existence.

“I wanted to create the fragile and slippery ground upon which our life and our existence rest,” explains the artist. Using the figure of the Buddhist monk and Buddhist iconography as a metonym for larger questions, he employs his characteristic visual language elements in search for an understanding of Being against the backdrop of its incompleteness in our mortal journey.

Through his phenomenological visual interventions, Iranna shows how we have failed to articulate a language to explain our origins, our destination and our sense of purpose in the collective solitude of humankind. Even when we are together, we stand alone in tackling these questions that concern each of us and define the nature of our mortality. While nominally depicting religious symbols, the works are not representations of Buddhism, per se, but rather visual vehicles for exploring deeper human questions alluded to in the quotation by Alphonso Lingis above.

With characteristic abstract backgrounds, devoid of figurative, representational content, Iranna’s work embodies the ‘neither here nor there’ space that Michel Foucault called ‘heterotopias’- interstitial spaces at “the intersection of the real and the virtual” that collapse the binary between the two. In this way, he transcends the pervasive Orientalist essentialism that is frequently implicated in iconic representations of “Eastern” spiritualist symbology.

Multiple layers of absence are present in this body of work. Absence appears in Iranna’s paintings in the Buddhist sense as absence of desire, longing, struggle, manifesting as transcendence in the search for meaning. It appears in the phenomenological sense as the absence of explanations and definite answers to the questions of existence.

Absence resides in the spatio-temporal dislocation of the figures of against the heterotopic background and foregrounded perforations in the surface appearance of the works, and heterotopia makes absence into a space of possibility. Visually there is also an absence of horizons; there are paths but no destinations.