Shades and Tones

Roman poet, satirist, and critic Horace had famously remarked in his work Ars Poetica,  “Ut pictura poesis (As is painting so is poetry)” to make people understand the complex and complementary relationship between both, poetry and painting. Going through Nandita Chaudhuri’s illustrated book/catalogue, Unmasked: Reflections in Brush and Ink (Mapin; 300 pages; ₹4950), Horace’s phrase resonates in that it makes one wonder—is painting poetry or poetry, well, art?

Painters engaging in poetry and literature are not uncommon. Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore is a prime example of finding art in poetry or poetry in art. Other modernists from various artist collectives such as J Swaminathan (Group 1890), FN Souza (Bombay Progressive Group), Gieve Patel (Green Movement), have been writers and poets too. Interestingly, painter Prabhakar Barwe, who experimented with various media, wrote detailed notes in his diary related to his art, and his feelings. His art surveyed space, using mundane objects such as hangers, safety pins, clocks, and watches.

Mindfully turning the pages of Unmasked is also a meditative experience. It also calls for an awareness in that the poems accompanying the paintings need an enquiry, a closer inspection, to unravel the mind of the artist who is concerned, particularly, with the treatment of women in society, the imperativeness of gender taking control of their bodies, choices, while making their voices matter. It’s with good reason then that legendary lyricist, screenwriter, and poet Javed Akhtar, describes Chaudhuri’s poems as “companions or extensions of her artwork”.

The publication has been a rich accompaniment to Chaudhuri’s recent solo shows in Mumbai at Ice Factory Ballard Estate or IFBE, one of the newer cultural centres, and Gallery Art & Soul. The recently concluded show focussed on Chaudhuri’s multidisciplinary language in visual arts, which are, as Paris-based art historian and researcher Rahma Khazam describes in Unmasked, “artistic investigations into the depths of human nature.”

Khazam’s essay on Chaudhuri is a deep dive into the latter’s artistic journey; she began her career three decades ago painting nudes when she moved from India to London, continuing to investigate and experiment with various media, including mixed media collages featuring computer chips, motherboards, safety pins, hangers, among other daily use items. The motifs and imagery of these objects—safety pins, in particular—on the publication’s pages add layers of significance and mystery for the reader to be further acquainted with Chaudhuri’s art. Khazam describes the use of safety pins in Chaudhuri’s art: “The safety pins… when open, they symbolise hope and the possibility of change, and when closed, withdrawal and immutability. Yet, a closed safety pin… can join things together and thereby resolve rifts and divisions—and it needn’t stay closed forever but can also be reopened.”

Another essay in Unmasked by Vickram Sethi, art curator and founder of ICIA, Arts Trust, and Asta Guru Auction House, explains how motifs of threads and safety pins are symbolic to illustrate the contradictions of life. In Sethi’s view, “The safety pins and threads… at some point would have held up a crucial garment… like a reminder of a garment malfunction”.

For London-based curator and art critic Virginia Damtsa, Chaudhuri’s work is informed by her travels, a reason why her art and poems are both filled with rich symbolism, cross-cultural narratives, along with universal questions and themes. It’s no wonder then that Chaudhuri, as Damtsa continues, “masters new forms of expression to question and probe, extending her canvas to the multimedia format” thus deploying technology as a formidable artistic tool. For the record, Chaudhuri’s NFT art was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

Unmasked brings to life the journey of this contemporary poet, painter, sculptor, writer and NFT artist, giving many art enthusiasts and connoisseurs, a reason to dive further to understand Chaudhuri’s artistic discipline.

This is why, given the importance of her art, one can’t help but feel the error of this otherwise engaging book missing out on the dates of her artwork.

Though one of the write-ups in the book reasons that “the paintings and poems appear not by date or genre, but by chapters of introspection and thought” one can’t help but feel a rising itch to fix this, especially given how critical it is to document art, particularly in richly produced books, by title, genre, size, medium, and year, to map journeys of artists. Another quibble is the compelling but oft-repeated poem, “I am formless, free…” that appears more than twice on different pages in the book. One can’t help but wonder why this was required? In the artist’s own words: “The two media—of painting and poetry—when set against each other, create crosscurrents like magnets attracting and repelling in the same degree; they dissolve into each other and yet metaphorically celebrate their separateness, like being in a fine-tuned tango…” The artist, in her essay, ‘Outside Confined Spaces and Definitions,’ adds that her poetry does not seek to annotate and bring to life paintings but instead seeks an additional means to extend the vocabulary of a single emotion profoundly.

While the publication has the poems set between the blank spaces of artworks or on facing pages of the painting, in live exhibitions, her poems are brilliant wall texts accompanying the paintings to enhance the sensory experience for the viewers.

Her poems are varied—philosophical (“Upon death, you will take nothing with you, not even your name…”); surreal (“…from above, the kaleidoscope dissolves into vapour / the coordinates below, are negligible…”); navigating interpersonal relationships (“We have all been playing a board game… Why does the mind not accept shapes and attributes for what they are?”); feminist (“…if life is precious, why should one dot just follow another?”)—and in the artist’s own words, “juxtaposed as a thin under-layer, further bringing out the harsh brutality in the story”.

Unmasked brings alive the mysteries of Chaudhuri’s art whispering with political and feminist themes along with her meditative poems—she is gearing up to publish them independently—that discuss life, death, and everything else in-between.

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