Waswo X Waswo: Love, Loss and Letting Go

IN HEAVEN ON EARTH, a new painting by Waswo X Waswo, a forest transforms into the para­disiacal. Tall trees, flush with foliage, rise across a terracotta-sienna landscape rendered in the miniature style with stone pigment, gouache and gold on wasli paper. Speckled among them are dozens and dozens of black bucks—animals revered by the Bishnoi community—inspired by Squirrels in a Plane Tree, the 17th-century painting by Abu’l Hasan and Mansur, and painted in exquisite detail. Some graze the forest lands, others gather as if in conversation, a twosome drink from a clear blue pool and others rest in the shadow of trees. The leisure extends to the only human figures in the scene, two—one in a suit and fedora, another in a white lungi— content in each other even as they gaze in different directions.

Those familiar with Waswo will immediately recognise the man in the suit as an alter-ego of the American-born artist who has made India his home and the epicentre of his practice for the last two decades. The other is his partner of 35 years, Thomas ‘Kaka’ Livieri, an Italian who adopted the lungi as his uniform as he settled into the ways of the country. Sprawled beneath a tree in the painting, as if one with the flora and fauna, the two painted figures find themselves in a moment of perfect harmony—with each other and the world around them.

Heaven on Earth is one among several standout works of art in The Darkness and the Star, Waswo’s new exhibition, on view at New Delhi’s Bikaner House. It is a cel­ebration of contemporary miniature art, meticulously created by Waswo’s team of artists based in Udaipur where he lives for most of the time. It is an exhibition that extends the team’s focus on ideas of death, afterlife, memories and reincarnation which began with Heaven and That Other Place, presented in Mumbai’s Galerie ISA last year. But most importantly, it is one of Waswo’s most personal exhibitions yet— a meditation on loss and longing drawn from a lifetime of love.

A little over a year ago, this new exhi­bition was nowhere on Waswo’s radar. Days before The Darkness and the Star is set to be unveiled, we are sitting in the rotunda of Bikaner House, as his team prepares one of the indoor galleries for the display. “I did not set out to make a sequel to Heaven and that Other Place,” he recalls. “We had that show a year ago, and it dealt with death. It was a dark subject but the show went very well. We got a lot of praise and good reviews, and we sold out.” Waswo, who is in his 70s, had been pondering on death—not an unusual subject to ponder especially as one ages—but gave the subject a sense of buoyancy and wit.

In the days following the show, Waswo received a call from a friend in Bangkok, where his partner Thomas Livieri (Waswo calls him Tommy) had been living for the past few years. Waswo spends a few months every year in the Thailand capital. The friend said he hadn’t seen Livieri around, as the artist realised that he had not their customary calls and messages for a couple of days either. The next call from Bangkok brought news that that Livieri had died in his sleep; Waswo remembers bursting into tears during the call. It is reimagined in the fifth painting of a suite titled Towards Eternity, as Waswo’s Fedora Man weeps on the side of his companion, laid to rest in the bucolic setting which one has served as their place of leisure. A troop of langurs bears witness, one of  them consoling the grieving man.

Now, almost a year later, that grief has culminated in The Darkness and the Star. The show carries forward themes from his previous exhibition, but the new works are distinguished by Livieri’s influence—even in the frames where his lungi-clad figure is absent. “Tommy’s death moved me a lot and I decided to make the show in his memory,” Waswo says, adding that he and his team worked to present a perspective that was spiritual, uplifting, even humorous, despite the looming presence of death. “Tommy was a humorous man,” Waswo explains. “He loved to crack jokes. He was much more social and more empa­thetic than I am. And, he gave me the freedom to be an artist.”

At its core, The Darkness and the Star is rooted in a universal, and relatable idea. It is a love story. Waswo’s Fedora Man and Livieri spend their days in lush, idyllic landscapes, wading through rivers, climbing up trees and mountains. In Closer to Heaven, they stand atop a hill overlooking a forest blooming with colour. Deer roam the land below in the company of lazing men. Waswo describes his early visits to India with Livieri among the most beautiful experiences of his life. “We were in heav­en. We used to have a budget of `1500 a day which included food, travel and lodging for the both of us. That was back in the day when you could get a room in a guest house for `100,” he says. “We went to Pushkar and lived for a month, and then in Jaipur and Jaisalmer. And we were lost in jungles many times, both in North and South India.” As Waswo established his practice, and found artis­tic collaborators in India, the two made India home; Livieri lived in Goa for over a decade before moving to Bangkok.

NAVIGATING THIS STORY through miniature art captures what Waswo describes as an “idealised imagination” of their time in India. “I am a Jungian at heart, and like the idea of dreams.” The paintings are indeed dreamlike, even surreal­ist at times in works like The World Turned Upside Down which depicts an inverted landscape. Waswo likes the works of surrealist artists, and the new exhibition includes hat-tips to the works of René Magritte particularly in the work titled The Inevitable Direction. In keeping with his practice, Waswo juxtaposes diverse ideas—the scientific and the spiritual, the Western and the Indian—and ensconces love and loss in the symbolism and metaphors. In the painting titled The Passage, the two men ride buffalos through the water—the animal regarded in Indian mythology as Yama’s vahana (vehicle), the recurring motif of the lotus symbolises growing into peace and the feminine figure of the pari represents wisdom and insights, as well as what Janeita Singh describes in the exhibition’s catalogue, as “the bridge between the conscious and uncon­scious realms of the cosmos”. Waswo also recalls other memories—such as the telescope, a nod to his late brother who loved astronomy and once built a telescope out of cardboard tubes.

In conversations, Waswo often re­turns to love. Among the works he high­lights is At the Tree of Harmony, which he describes as one of the most interesting, if not the most beautiful. At the centre of the painting are two trees intertwined into each other as if in love themselves. On the ground, reminiscent of a village scene, Indian men sit smoking and napping while Waswo and Livieri sit on top of the tree “having tea like English gentlemen”. Look closely, says the artist, and Livieri looks a little angry as if he’s scolding his partner. The expression has Waswo’s attention for the implicit suggestion that love isn’t always perfect. And it is a fitting tribute to a man who Waswo calls his first critic.

WASWO WONDERS IF minia­ture artist Chirag Kumawat, who painted the figures in At the Tree of Harmony, gave Livieri that look on purpose. The son of Shankar Kumawat, who has worked with Waswo for two decades, Chirag accompanied the artist for the opening in Delhi and treats him like a beloved uncle—he, along with others, call Waswo chacha while Livieri was kaka. Chirag grew up painting and watching his father work with Waswo. “One day, Chirag showed me one of his paintings and it was spectacular. I told him to try something for me and then asked if he would like to join the team,” he says. Chirag adds, beaming, “I was waiting for the day he would ask me.”

Waswo’s oeuvre has always been shaped by teamwork, from his early years of collaboration with Rajesh Soni for hand-painted photographs in previous years to the team of Udaipur artists who work with him now. Contemporary min­iature art has come to be one of Waswo’s signatures, along with hand-painted photographs, and recent exhibitions have showcased his atelier’s expertise and their ability to blend different schools of art. Apart from Shankar and Chirag Kumawat, there are brothers Dalpat (who also paints Waswo’s photo­graphs) and Banti Jingar—from Waswo’s concepts and aesthetic supervision to the works of individual artists, each painting is the result of collective talent. If Shankar paints a golden sky, Dalpat and Banti fill in the details—mountains, trees and skies—and Chirag adds figures to the look. Even as the team experiments with their art, they continue using traditional materials and processes—still using wasli paper, sourced from Jaipur, as canvas and working with natural stone pigments and handmade gold lead along with gouache. “I consider them my family, and they have adopted me into theirs,” Waswo adds.

The artists also aims to build on his team’s strengths—having discovered that Chirag idolises Pieter Bruegel, he is letting him hone his figurative painting skills. In one incident, Dalpat found himself out with no assignments during one of Waswo’s Bangkok trips. “When I returned, he showed me a painting he had made. It was the most gorgeous minia­ture, painted with minimal colours.” Dalpat’s work led to a trio of paintings titled All Life’s Colours Have Faded who monochrome palette adds a haunt­ing quality to the exquisitely detailed landscape—the trees and river also in mourning with the lone human figure in the scene.

Innovation is essential, argues Waswo, but one must undertake it in a way that feels true to one’s artistic trajectory and elevates it. For the new exhibition, paying tribute to his late partner was paramount. “But I also wanted to try some new things,” he says. “We have done long, vertical paintings. And, we have also done bronze sculptures.” Translating themes from paint to metal, these were hand-cast by Jaipur-based Hansraj Chitra Bhoomi. In one-untitled sculpture, Waswo and Livieri are seated back-to-back on the con­joined bodies of two buffaloes, simultane­ously separate and united.

Livieri has appeared in Waswo’s works earlier; the artist says he will con­tinue to paint him. “I can’t WhatsApp him anymore, or expect to hear back,” he says. “But he is alive in the paintings.”

(The Darkness and the Star is on display till December 16 at Bikaner House, New Delhi)