On the Threshold of ‘A Portrait’

Review

‘On the Threshold of Time’ is a group show of four young fresh graduates from Delhi College of Art, New Delhi. Mounted at the Heritage Art Gallery in the city, this show attracts the viewer with its emphasis on ‘self-portraits,’ feels Nisha Aggarwal.

Why do artists paint self-portraits, is an age old question in art history. When asked Frida Kahlo once, the artist replied, ‘because I am the subject, I know best’. Answer to this question varies as artists have responded to this in their own ways. The first ever believed to be found portrait was by the Ancient Greek sculptor Phidias, who inserted a likeness of himself in the frieze ‘Battle of the Amazons’ at the Parthenon in Athens. The Early Renaissance artists of the mid-15th century can be more frequently identified depicting themselves as either the main subject, or as important character in their work.

A Rare Self-Portrait by Adolf Hitler
(Photo: Caters News)

Italian Renaissance painters avoided producing formal self-portraits, but tended to insert images of themselves in their painting. Instances can be seen in the paintings of artists Simone Masaccio, Piero della Francesca, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Raphael, and Titian. Some Florentine artists like Gentile Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci executed more formal self-portraits. The 20th century sought the painters like Henri Matisse, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee and Max Beckmann producing stylistic portraits of themselves. Likewise, the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo executed 55 self-portraits depicting her personal torment. The great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso painted a wide range of autobiographical portraits depicting himself at various stages of his artistic career. All these artists used self-portraits either to advertise their skills, to explore inner turmoil or to stake a place in history. Beyond representing one’s physical and inlying attributes, self-portraiture can also announce one’s style. The reasons may be whatever but it can be deciphered as a painting with art of writing.

A Work by Akshay Sethi

Once again ask the question; why do artists paint self-portraits? This question comes to me again as I descend the stairs of the Art Heritage gallery, which is located at the basement of the Triveni Kala Sangam, New Delhi. There I confront a huge portrait of a young man wearing a Shaktiman costume. This one is by Rahul Gautam, one of the participating artists in the group show. The question refuses to fade as I walk along the aisle of the gallery, where Akshay Sethi’s works are displayed on either side. Sethi’s works focus more on the plight of the middle class caught in the metropolitan cities. These self-portraits are not heavily detailed, however, they tell me about the issues of the aam aadmi in his/her efforts to survive in big cities.

Naughty Boy by Dipanker Pramanik

Inside the main gallery, I see the works of Dipanker Pramanik, Sambodhi Ascharya and Rahul Gautam. Dipanker revels in the immediate and he gives expression to his visuals responses in small paper works. These are windows kept open to his life, to his family and the life that floats by. Sambodhi dares to bare as she paints female nudes though she blurs the nudity by photoshop act. For the artist, female body is not different than the landscapes and the natural aesthetics they carry in them. But what attracts me more is a series of self-portraits by Rahul Gautam done mostly in oil and acrylic on canvas or pencil on paper.

Shakti-Shakti-Shaktiman by Rahul Gautam

In Rahul’s works the perceived reality around him meets the imagined reality inside the artist’s head. Hence one could see a lot of popular images in his works. He gives iconic status to the ordinary individuals; at times to his own self and at other times to his family members. The characterization of these works is crucial to the artists as several of them are ‘living’ people; his family members or friends. Rahul’s dependence on autobiography could be read out as a need for self-validation felt by the artist himself. He repeatedly changes the ambience of the locales where these protagonists are seen and this changing ambience in a way suggests his thoughts and desires. For instance, in ‘Lovely One’ he depicts the union of college mates in a birthday party or something. By the mere enlarging of the scale of the painting, he underlines the importance that gives to a mundane occurrence.

Lovely One by Rahul Gautam

‘Hey! What’s Up?’ is from the series of works on his facebook addiction and relations. These pencil portraits are profile pictures of his facebook friends (his real life friends too) and the text written with them is taken from facebook chat-box, which defines their character or personality. His other work ‘Cold War’ also promulgates his relationship with one of his closest friend, penning how after having some misunderstandings a cold war began between them. She has some resemblance with Mona Lisa, so Rahul portrayed her as Mona Lisa while erasing her facial features. Same whittling of the facial features is indicated in his sculptural portrait of that friend (in one portrait among a set of four portraits). Before portraying her as Mona Lisa, Rahul had created her portrait in clay and sequence of these four portraits shows the creation to destruction of a relation.

Hey! What's Up?, A Set of 9 Portraits by Rahul Gautam

In the work, ‘Babu, You will be a star one day’, an old family photo with his father and siblings but one who is wearing Shaktiman’s costume is Rahul himself. He ‘edited’ his dress in the old photo while converting it into a large painting. The title is taken from his father’s refrain. In another painting he portrays himself as Shaktiman; it is a sort of searching for the self therefore an act of self-discovery.

Cold War by Rahul Gautam

His selection of the pictures that he paints has a similarity. The gaze of his characters look directly into the eyes of the viewers as to create a relation with them. Technically Rahul is inspired with hyperrealist artists, but his concepts of portraits are more near to the contemporary aspects of it as ‘selfies’. The selfie is a smartphone-produced version of the self-portrait, which has been a staple of art and photography history since artists first began seeing or examining their own images in the mirror. Shot mostly with smartphone cameras, a way for the one shooting the picture to see themselves the way they would like to be seen. Thus far, the selfies have concentrated mostly on the philosophical implications of disseminating them via social networks and the internet, wherein the selfie can receive validation from their social circle.

Babu, You will be a Star one day

This is the fourth exhibition by Art Heritage Gallery in the exhibition series of ‘On the Threshold of Time’, which majorly includes the young artists or fresh graduates from fine arts colleges. All these artists have portrayed the image of their alternative self that shares and reflects their intramural core, just like the words of Pablo Picasso that, ‘we are to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it’.

Picture Courtesy: Art Heritage Gallery & Rahul Gautam

The exhibition is on view till 29th May, 2014.

(First Appeared Online in CartanArt Magazine, Issue-IV, May 2014)