Warhol and the History of Art Painting

PALETTE OF MY VISUAL THEATRE In Palette of my Visual Theatre, Durga Kainthola stages a stimulating, complex play between art, the symbolic and the immeasurable. The distinctiveness of these works lies in cohesion of images, simplicity of line and rendering of the pictorial. Throughout, concrete expression of her style flows as “extensions of my thoughts, day to day happening of things in life.” Portraiture dominates her oeuvre, in a signature expression of beings, of other artists. Confident and receptive, she relinquishes control and allows drama to unfold. How many minute attributes are transfixed, caught by the painter’s brush, the poet’s verse. An original and chimerical foresight, which celebrates work with a cosmopolitan flair and international cross-fertilizations. Kainthola’s palette boasts a vast vocabulary and rainbow realm of hue. At once lyrical, and poetic, wise and irreverent, witty and timeless, it illumines a global amphitheatre of her inquisitiveness. Metamorphosis connotes the infinite possibilities of transformation, concretisation of an ineffable truth – of change, within continuity Glimpsed in a library in 1982, an image of the Marilyn Monroe diptych by Warhol surfaces in her work in 2002…as magic of renewal, the crystal lacuna of past, present and future. Magnifying a spectral lexicon, to signify art as synergy, Palette of my Visual Theatre, stretches the imagination. Multifold personae from Indian mythology surrounded by flora and fauna encounter Warhol in Goddess Comes to New York, mounted within a light box. Throughout the History of Art series, a reverberation of the ‘combines’ of Robert Rauschenberg’s work can be seen, part-painting, part-drawing. An astute, surprising effort at blending vibrant allegories. Poised against black-and-white backdrops, Kainthola effects resonance between the energies of Picasso, Gaugin, Modigliani, Duchamp, Tyeb Mehta and Souza, often with magenta lotus borders and prominent AEIOU friezes of Hindi letters. In The Painter’s Studio, Kainthola’s own face serves as the canvas upon which Vermeer paints on his easel. Pages from My Visual Notebook (3 books) chronicle a movement from the abstract to concrete. Intricate tableaus unfold as if a narrative hand scroll, with a new language from when she first incorporated her own image and drew upon it with myriad tonalities of ink. A contemporary draughts woman’s autobiographical take on the quixotic portrait of the Mona Lisa. Day after day, she produced a visual entity (computer generated inkjet prints on paper and vinyl) and worked on its surface…these became her ‘diary’. On one single page, two twentieth century masters of different genres, V.S. Naipaul and Bhupen Khakar, materialise, as if to orchestrate a ‘ thinking out of the box’ dialogue of simile and narrative realism. A most adroit example of this fluidity is the triptych, Amrita SherGil, from the Notebook series. One panel portrays SherGil’s letter to her parents, the second art from Ajanta, and the third SherGil herself seated. Kainthola’s work honours the interconnectivity of art, stated in SherGil’s letter: “Modern art has led me to the comprehension + appreciation of Indian painting + sculpture.” A strong, original painter who in her own life and creativity bridged modernism between the East and West. Influences of Surrealism’s serious experimental attitude toward the subconscious characterise work such as The Kiss. One butterfly impasto emblazons Monroe’s lips like a mercurial censor and another in her hair like an Art Nouveau barrette. Throughout the Palette of my Visual Theatre, this embrace of the concrete and the fantastic share centre arena, to realise a tenuous unity of scale, subject and composition. Perhaps, Kainthola’s work, throughout its diverse phases and painterly endeavours, juggling contextual synapses and lenses, can be seen as ‘gestalt’ (Ger. configuration). On another dais, consider the elegance and fancifulness of the panoramic piece, The Three Graces. Small-scale drawings are intense and subtle in character, a precursor to the latest ambitious solo paintings, The Last Judgment, Modigliani and Nefertiti. Kainthola’s imagination is incessantly changing scenes, dangling scenarios across the picture plane. At any time, retracing and commingling spheres of memory and inspiration: observed prints in the sand on Bombay beaches appear as the footprints of Raza and Hussain on earlier canvases (again this trace quintessence of art), lines from T.S. Eliot’s poems, an ongoing aesthetic homage to fiercely gifted woman painters, in particular Frida Kahlo and Amrita SherGil (esteemed for their inventive worlds), as well as pop icons, classical deities, old masters and modern iconoclasts. Kainthola blends diverse figure-ground liaison and rich pigmentation from the vista of art history, from classical Western (think of Correggio and Da Vinci) and Indian court painting (Mughal and Rajput miniatures), to the most established and controversial of modernist procreation/invention. Transcribed with a novel spontaneity, her brush and pen act like a glass lantern, casting shadows, uncovering mental pictures. Furthermore, The Last Judgment (print on canvas with acrylic/mixed media) reconfigures classical references, juggling the meaning of portrayal. Dialectics of creativity mark a swirling, omnipresent meeting of the physical and metaphysical. “The creation of an icon is an art of the same order of the creation of the world.” From one composition to another, the Palette of my Visual Theatre, summons a continuum of abstract and representational, seemingly the blend of matter and reflection. And so does her wand paint its energetic wit and passion beyond our minds, casting an intuitive metamorphosis and vital fusion of colour and form. A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time. -T.S. Eliot, chorus from The Rock, VII (1934) Elizabeth Rogers Artist Statement: For some time now, I have been exploring myriad levels of visual imagery, juxtaposing iconographic detail drawn from the ancient and modern art both Indian and from the west…. moved into the fluid realm of active, syncopated three-dimensional visualisation sequencing idiosyncratic language and perception. This journey into multi-media, moving imagery carries the broader dimensions of energy infused with contemporary metaphor. Mirrored in the highly polychrome written and painted signboards are modern enactments of miniatures, illuminated per neon lit sign, the quotidian transforms into the surreal… A spontaneous and dramatic re-interpretation of an artist ….

Painting:Paper on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:6 W x 4 H x 0.1 D in

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