Scenes of Love

He was studying at the Florence Academy of Art, but Varad Bang was restless, frustrated by a curriculum that emphasised slowness over quickly observable results. The world was still under Covid’s shadow, he was an Indian boy abroad, finding it hard to gel with people; the course was such that it took weeks to complete a drawing. “My parents would ask, what are you doing there? There was a big gap between my expectations and the output—it made me question my decision to give up architecture for painting.”

It also became easy to get lost in the world of social media, including Instagram artists who produced at breakneck speed. “I was looking at people who were doing quick comics, sketches, doodles, and I did some of this too, before realising I was more drawn to what was being taught at the Academy.”

In the first year most of the students were only working with charcoal. But slowly the transition to colour began, with the restricted hues of the Grisaille palette—white, umber, black—and Bang found his footing. “I started giving myself more time to do realistic paintings, capturing deep emotions, studying light and shadow.”

That uncertain journey has shown rich results now, leading to eighteen paintings, oil on linen, that make up his current exhibition The Weight of Love—a lush, layered tribute to a film that first cast a spell on cinephiles 25 years ago.

For many of us movie nerds who were in our twenties when Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love came out—and especially for those struggling with messy romance—the film is inseparable from certain moods and motifs: the ache of unfulfilled love, the loneliness that can be felt even when you’re in a crowd, the image of two people passing each other like ships in the night, or caught in a brief encounter that could have been so much more. The bond between the protagonists Chow (Tony Leung) and Su (Maggie Cheung)—neighbours in an apartment complex in 1960s Hong Kong—begins when they realise their spouses are conducting a clandestine affair. But it grows into a profound relationship on its own terms.

Bang, born just a year before In the Mood for Love came out in 2000, encountered the film when it was well-enshrined as a classic. Growing up in Aurangabad, he had been insulated from subtitled international cinema (“It was a middle-class background, I knew nothing of art films or theatre”), but after moving to Italy he found more culturally adventurous friends, and Wong’s film left an immediate impact. “I was in the post-state of a heartbreak, and could relate to how he showed silences and unspoken emotions. It wasn’t about the grand things people do in love.”

He was also struck by how the film—intense, languid—emphasized the relationship between people and their environment; in this, it evoked one of his favourite painters, Vermeer. “How the space we are in witnesses our emotions, and experiences them too—that idea stayed with me.”

 So he began painting, working with some of the film’s most iconic visuals (Chow seen from the back, cigarette smoke swirling above him; Su and Chow sitting contemplatively in a taxi, or crossing each other in a narrow alley), but also making some atypical choices, moments that might flash by when you watch them in the film: a gesture, a shadow, a glow cast by a street-lamp on an oppressive, rainy night. He also wanted to alternate between images where you don’t see the characters’ faces—“This allows you to be in their shoes”—and those where the faces are visible: “Now you see them as other people, removed, to whom something is happening. I aimed for that push-pull effect.”

I had spoken to Bang on a video call, and seen the paintings on a laptop screen, but just as some films become very different animals in a dark hall, it is essential to view these artworks up close, as part of a well-curated exhibition. The Gallery Pristine Contemporary is on one of south Delhi’s more chaotic roads, but this adds to the effect of descending into the hushed space designed by Sumant Jayakrishnan. You leave the city’s summer and its street noise behind, and walk into a 360-degree experience, visual and aural. The decor evokes the period setting through rotary phones, a transistor, lamps, vivid red wallpaper and drapes; even a small room with three of the paintings in it seems to replicate the film’s cramped spaces. And there is the unforgettable music, including the lilting ‘Yumeji’s Theme’, impossible to dissociate from this film.

As Bang points out, the works are designed to be seen in a particular order. The initial paintings are warm and inviting (Su and Chow are together in most of them, becoming increasingly close) but as we move past the halfway stage the paintings become cooler, more distant; the protagonists are rarely seen together, each appears lost in their own thoughts. “It is like love and memory fading away over time,” he says.

Proprietorial fans of In the Mood for Love may be discomfited by one of his decisions: to depict a couple of scenes that didn’t appear in the film, and which might even be seen as going against its dominant mood. In the narrative, Chow and Su appear to decide that they won’t consummate their relationship. What they do or don’t do is open to interpretation, but Wong shot and then discarded a scene of the couple kissing—so there is no evidence of physical intimacy in the final cut. For many viewers this non-realisation of desire is what gives In the Mood for Love its particular appeal.

Bang, however, has painted not just that deleted kiss, but another scene that depicts the protagonists in bed together, looking furtively at the viewer. Did he have an alternative version of the film in his head? “I wanted a touch of mischievousness,” is his response, “but I also think it’s notable that in the film the only physical contact—leaning on each other, clasping hands—occurs when they are both sad, not in moments of happiness.” The bed painting is imbued with guilt: “It’s like they are asking the viewer if what they are doing is right or wrong. There is the sense of a love that can never be easy or smooth.”

“Every scene is like a painting,” is a cliche associated with In the Mood for Love. Turning its scenes into artworks might seem an obvious fanboyish thing to do; with the most faithful representations—such as one of Chow and Su walking away together after learning of their spouses’ transgressions—one might initially wonder what the point is. But in the gallery space, mimicking the film’s womb-like aesthetic, it is easier to see how the paintings are a palpably different form. In the freezing of a moment so that one becomes attentive to things one might miss in a single, continuous viewing of the film: the colour and design of a lamp, the creases in a white shirt. Or how an arm, in mid-gesture, has a smudged quality, even when the other features are sharp. Some paintings have an almost impressionistic quality, such as the one of Su as a small figure against a wall, a familiar image from the film but very different in texture here: her features aren’t clearly delineated, instead one recognises her by the bright green dress and the pose. The viewer fills in the details.

What attracted Bang was the possibility of capturing a tangible sense of movement within a still image. Painting portraits, he says, wasn’t something that had interested him much: “That was too static for me. Films, on the other hand, have movement and action, a mix of absence and presence.”

“As a viewer I don’t have control over how long I am looking at a film scene, but as an artist I want to make viewers linger over a particular feeling, without the pressure of the next frame.”

Cinema being by far the younger medium, there have been nods to painting throughout its history—from the 1936 film Rembrandt evoking the great artist’s style to more contemporary films that pay tribute to well-known art: a scene in Shutter Island that recreates Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss, countless nods to Edward Hopper in films as disparate as Psycho and Blade Runner. Is the relationship now moving in the opposite direction? “It’s a two-way street, definitely,” says Bang, mulling over other films that he might have used as inspiration “There are moments which have tempted me—the striking bathtub scene in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, for instance. Many beautiful scenes from Portrait of a Lady on Fire, or La La Land, or Hitchcock’s works.”

What he is working on now, though, has no connection to cinema. It is a series that comes from his own imagination, influenced by Vermeer, but also making contemporary references. A painting he shows me on his phone depicts a topless woman sitting up in bed, looking like she might have come out of the Dutch Golden Age—except there is a mobile phone on the side-table, with the Bumble app visible. It is a compelling picture of loneliness, a theme that is close to Bang’s heart. “Life has got so busy now—even while eating you’re looking at the phone. People are afraid of solitude, but loneliness can be beautiful. A person lost in thought, making a small unselfconscious gesture—that’s very appealing to me.”

Online, one can still see some of the black-and-white illustrations Bang did during his own social-media phase: giant eyeballs, bird-tree hybrids in fantastical settings. These are vivid, playful creations, but they represent a phase he has left behind—a rite of passage, a way to attain clarity about what he really wanted to do. “My job as an artist is to slow people down when they come to a gallery.” In a world where creativity is under pressure from artificial intelligence, with its constant threat of getting things done fast—and from Instagram Reels that encourage rapid scrolling—Bang aims to do personal art that takes time—and then in turn demands time and introspection from the viewer too, a readiness to put the clutter of the world aside. “To stand and absorb, and have a silent moment.”

(The Weight of Love by Varad Bang is on display at Gallery Pristine, Delhi, till May 11)

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