We are confronted with the artist’s expression when we view artwork in an art gallery. The influence of these pieces of art frequently sticks in our memories. We are compelled to commend the artist and his creations in such a circumstance. You can take advantage of these numerous art shows practically every day if you live in Delhi NCR. Over the past few decades, this city has seen a significant rise in the quantity of private art galleries where you can regularly view the artwork. However, it is unusual that we learn about the background stories of these pieces of art, which are connected to the artist and his corresponding works of art, when we come across them.From the pen of renowned art critic and curator Johnny ML, along with a critique of the artworks of young artist Navakash, comes the intimate story behind the artist’s creation and the artworks, which is often unheard…
Johny ML with Nava Kash
‘There was a boy, a very enchanted boy.’ One day he started walking on a railway track. He heard the engine honking its horn, but he kept walking. In a flash he knew something heavy and speeding hitting him. He fell on the tracks. The train passed over him. A few meters away from the guard’s wagon at the rear, his inert body lied bleeding profusely. He did not know he would survive. Good Samaritans took him to a hospital where he was treated back to life. None knew it was a suicide attempt, he did not tell the complete story to anyone either. It was a case of personal negligence. The elders in the village taunted him for being reckless. You should not have walked on the tracks, they admonished him. He just smiled.
The year was 2005. The boy who thought of ending his life on the railway tracks was a fine arts graduate from Government College of Fine Arts, Gauhati, Assam. He was working as a cartoonist for a local newspaper. The pittance that he earned from there was not enough to pull through, still he kept at it, going to the office in the afternoon and finishing his work by evening, before the day’s edition went to the press. One day, the editor called the young graduate to his chamber and said that he was no longer needed in the office. They couldn’t afford a temporary hand to amuse the readers with his pocket cartoons. He was shattered. He was going through a rough patch, the girl he liked had different plans for her life, lack of money was pressing him from all sides. He thought of his home back in the village. There was nothing much to hope for there either. So, he decided to end it all in one stroke. Death by a speeding monster.
The protagonist of this story is Navakash, an artist who goes by the first name. He could have ended somewhere in rural Assam, obscured by circumstances. After the failed attempt to take his life, while nursing him back to life, the doctors had told him that the recovery would take at least six months. A strict bed rest was advised. Navakash thought that was the end of his dreams to become an artist. At home, recuperating, one day he got a call letter from Santiniketan. He was going to get admission in the Printmaking department. He had completely forgotten about the application that he had sent to Santiniketan. Hopes revived, Navakash enhanced the rate of recovery, and within two months he was back on his feet, raring to go…this time to Santiniketan. Another girl appeared in Santiniketan who helped him in doing the primary chores during the admission and later. Loved and nursed by her soon he was a regular student at the Printmaking department.
In Santiniketan, Navakash worked in black and white prints and picked up a figurative style that was in vogue there at that time. Armed with a Postgraduation in Printmaking, he headed to Delhi in 2007. Days of struggling followed; gave art tuitions to young children, worked as a design helper in a textile unit and many other odd jobs where he could use his drawing and painting skills. A private gallerist, a small-time dealer took interest in his works and collected a few which took some of the financial burdens off from his shoulders. Soon Navakash found himself in Pune working in a company and in 2010 he got a call from the central Lalit Kala Akademi to participate in an art camp in Shillong. That was a point of epiphany. He could see his future as a fulltime artist. After the camp, with a decent sum to see him through the troubles of setting up a studio cum residence elsewhere, he came to Delhi and ever since he has been working in Delhi, as a fulltime artist.
In Delhi, in his second stint, the starting point was the Lalit Kala Akademi guest house in Mandi House, where he met an artist who went by the name Sannyasi Red. He told Navakash that he was cut for becoming a good artist. For any creative person, encouraging words of a senior from the same field could be better than manna. Navakash felt the same and sooner than later he set up his studio near Haus Khaz in Delhi. Working day and night, he could find some takers for his works once in a while and just before the pandemic he got some real art collectors from Italy and Germany, who supported him by collecting a few works. Things were happening for Navakash. He got married to Pratibha in 2021 and together they started cycling expeditions and covered extreme north of the country by bicycles. Rain or shine Navakash could be seen working in his studio, experimenting with both 2D and 3D works. However, he is more identified with his superflat paintings than the three-dimensional sculptures and relief-like paintings.
II
I noticed Navakash and his paintings during the pandemic years, especially when everyone was active on the social media. Once the lockdown was lifted, I decided to meet him though the chance came much later in 2023. On a summer day I went to his studio and he started showing me the paintings. I thought the works would never end. He had done so many paintings. The earlier ones showed his inclination towards semi-figurative paintings with the images of butterflies and flowers dotting the canvases. I could see how he had moved away from hardcore figurative expressions and embarked on a different journey with semi-figuration, which lasted only for a few months, a sort of interim phase before he launched himself full on the superflat expressions, which has become the current hallmark of Navakash, the artist.
I have been contemplating on his works since my first encounter with them a year ago. As a curator, I was looking for the right spaces where I could feature his works in a compact way. What attracted me to his works were their psychedelic optical illusionism and the employment of ‘Pop’ colors. The unapologetic use of pop colors, which I found quite daring because many artists think that their patrons wouldn’t like such colors for their preference for soft and pastel like feel of a work of art, in a way reflects the present scenario of populist visual communications as well as a critique of the same. While it reflects our times, at once it moves away from the orchestrated using of colors by those artists who have created their own conventions. Besides, the colors in Navakash’s paintings show the open-ended-ness of the visually communicated world where colors of all shades are accepted democratically and even the jarring colors are celebrated with equal verve.
The optical illusionism of Navakash’s paintings comes from the repeated use of flat patterns in a clever way. There is a randomness in his way of painting, but the design sense of the artist is so strong that they evolve in the pictorial surfaces in certain patterns that together create the optical illusions. This special feature of his works imparts a sense of kinaesthetics, a sense of beauty created by the things that move and the correlations that the movements generate in our sensory perceptions, which makes his works even in their superflat-ness possess a virtual depth. Navakash uses geometrical forms, which in a sense are popular shapes, recognized by people anywhere in the world, whose repetitions also energize the paintings with a renewed visual dynamism. A closer study of his oeuvre so far has helped me to understand that these geometrical patterns were there in his works earlier too. They were latent in the background but in the new body of paintings they have come to the forefront.
Navakash uses a lot of red, green, yellow and blue colors in his paintings. These primary colors have the capacity to generate a whole lot of shades when they are mixed with each other in different densities. In his works, Navakash does not attempt to mix the colors and create shades, instead, he uses them directly in order to achieve the kind of illusionistic effects that he wants to create. The choice of these colors has a different logic behind it, says Navakash. During his childhood, to meet the ends, his father used to make fans out of bamboo leaves and he colored them with red, green, yellow and blue pigments. Navakash used to take them to the market for selling and with the money thus earned he used to buy rice for the family. When he started using these colors in his works, he never thought of this childhood experience. But the more he looked at them the more he realized that how indelibly those experiences had etched in his memory only to sneak into his paintings even without his conscious knowledge.
III
When I first saw this body of works at Navakash’s studio in 2023, I remembered an art exhibition of the famous Japanese artist, Takashi Murakami at the Serpentine Gallery, Hyde Park, London. It was exactly twenty years ago. I was studying curatorial practice at the Goldsmiths College, University of London. The management of the Serpentine Gallery contacted our tutor, Prof. Anna Harding and requested her to send curator-students to conduct curatorial walks for the visitors during the Murakami exhibition. I was the chosen one along with a fellow female student. I spent hours studying the history of the rebellious artist, Takashi Murakami and before the assigned day, visited the gallery a couple of times to absorb the qualities of his works. The curatorial walk was conducted successfully and ever since I have been following the works of this artist. What I particularly got attracted in Murakami was the idea of Superflat.
Superflat, as an idea was not quite unfamiliar to me. While studying the Pop Art movement of the 1970s I had come across this term. It was used to connote the flatness of the pictorial surface, an emphasis on the two-dimensional quality of the image, which was fundamentally against the Renaissance idea of creating eye-fooling three dimensional volumes. In Murakami’s context, though he remains an ardent fan of the Popes of the Pop Art Movement such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichenstein, superflat comes from a different direction. Murakami grew up in Japan’s Manga culture, a pictorial culture where pictorial representations of anything are done devoid of three dimensionality. Japan’s Ukiyo-e woodcut printmaking culture is the forerunner of this flatness. Also, the subculture of Otaku too worked on this popular aesthetics. The two-dimensional nature of the works celebrated the popular culture, the subcultures and the underground cultural activities including graffiti. But at the same time, it was a critique on the high culture that stood on the mainstream pedestals.
In my curatorial approach, I make an effort to see the works of Navakash in the context of superflat. As I mentioned elsewhere, his works have the qualities of Op and Pop art movements. Superflat-ness makes them more appealing. There are no entry points to his works as such. One could see the works from different physical distances to feel their presence. The pure optical connection is also one way of engaging with the works of Navakash. The reintroduction of the memories of these twentieth century artistic movements is a deliberate curatorial ploy in order to clear up a parallel route of aesthetic discourse, especially along the main route of abstract art, where the textural varieties, impastos, technical virtuosity of the artist etc. are more talked about than the flatness of the pictorial surface. Superflat, therefore is a new way of engaging with the visual art in general; a point of departure between heavily loaded representational, figurative and decorative art, and the texture and feeling based abstractions.
Navakash’s works, technically speaking, are not done with an intention to create superflat paintings. It is a curatorial way of looking at his works, a critical deliberation from my side so that the works could be seen differently from the general lot of abstractions or even Op-art. As the curator of the show, I believe that this argument is pertinent to this context of exhibition and need not necessarily be percolating down through all of his works. The idea of superflat could be one of the possible ways of looking at his works. Navakash, as I have witnessed, paints with a passion and he too, at times makes light textural strokes. However, I have seen him flattening them out in order to make them visual components devoid of an ‘inside’. This virtual inside that everyone wants to see in a work of art is the location of interpretations. Navakash, interestingly, does not want his works to be interpreted to generate a series of narratives around them. He wants them to be seen against the contemporary cultural contexts where depth is the last thing that everyone wants to enjoy. He evokes the slippery surfaces, the facile engagements and fickle focus of our times. His works poke at the reel watching eyes and tease them with their tantalizing visual effects and persisting images that refuse to fade. Superflat is a camouflage that hoodwinks serious depths of existence.
