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Mohan Samant's
work is simultaneously drawing and painting. These two modalities
create a dramatic fusion of the expressive, the primitive, and
the abstract in art. These indices of the modern point us to
shifting frames of reference, multiple points of view in Mohan's
work. His modernism harks back to primitive times. For example,
Samant's textured, geological paintings recall the rough surfaces
of rocks and other natural formations. Just as early artists
at the dawn of history used these natural surfaces for their
mythopoeic expressions, so Samant's work renews our connection
with some of man's most direct, unmediated expressions in art
and life. Samant's primitivist modernism - his unconventional
color, boldness, innovation and abstraction - inheres in both
the drawing and the painting.
Mohan's
work is complex. It is not easy to unravel. It calls for a method,
an approach that suggests many cognitive connections. For example,
the dyadic tension articulated above could quite easily be assimilated
to a dialectical interplay of primitive and modern, drawing
and painting. I want to suggest that Mohan's works are layered.
More so, the suggestion is that this is the way to view them,
to take them apart, one layer at a time. This is not quite excavation,
and our goal is not quite an archaeology of Mohan's work. It
is instead a phenomenology, a vantage point of multiply experienced
work. It is arguable that his work consists of four layers,
as follows:
1) Abstract
Expressionist texturing and coloring
2) Primitivist
semiotic markings
3) Found
objects evoking lost civilizations and other worlds
4) Figurative
wire work
Mohan's
work exudes the explosive warmth of Abstract Expressionism.The
effect of his surfaces is immediate, and despite their enigmatic
character, they require no interpretive gloss. They are charged
with feeling, not symbols: we accept them as we find them. But
this is so because they are immediately present as paintings:
the objects on the canvas are bound together by the query and
response of painted sections to each other. This continues the
tradition initiated by the Abstract Expressionists, painters
like Newman and Gottlieb and Pollock. Samant's virtuosity is
indisputable; more significant perhaps is the life with which
he imbues his paintings, a kind of empirical vitalism not often
seen these days. His surfaces can be subtle in texture, wide
in range, and bold in color. His work does not cool off into
irony and smart wit as has much work after this period. More
important, Samant has developed a visual style that challenges
the sanitized look of contemporary life.
The visual
language through which Samant reconstructs a kind of primitivism
has a complicated pedigree. His affiliation for the primitive
divides into two complementary lineages. His fascination for
early art, especially Egyptian art, has allowed him to investigate
new formal possibilities in the format and surface of a painting.
For him, the mural format of prehistoric and Egyptian wall drawings
is more intriguing than three-dimensional sculptural models.
His experiments with very subtle mark-making on his canvas,
inspired by these prehistoric drawings, have allowed him the
possibility of creating a certain sculptural complexity on the
surface of the flat canvas. His subterranean and pictographic
marks are built into a flat layer of paint, with the layered
complexities of Egyptian excavations that combine objects and
men and animals in ingenious systems of closure and disclosure.
But Samant is drawn to the primitive in another sense too. This
is the sense in which “the primitive” is regarded
by the artist, on the whole, as always more instinctive, less
bound by artistic convention and history, and as somehow closer
to fundamental aspects of human existence. Samant has tried
like many modern artists to capture some of this freedom, as
he perceives it, in his own methods. Rothko's work from 1940
to 1946 is the prime example, but Newman's initial seed/amoeba
drawings are equally apt, and the references to fossil creatures
and geological stratigraphy in the works of David Smith, Theodoros
Stamos, and William Baziotes are just as certainly bound to
natural history. These are also evocations of cave writing in
Pollock's paintings, as well as a fascination with calligraphic
signs in Smith's drawings, in the later work of Gottlieb, and
in the paintings of Franz Kline and Mark Tobey. As one can see,
the relationship between the two approaches to the primitive
in his work, the first direct and innovative and the second
indirect via modernism, is a complex one.
However,
it is the movement towards assemblage and the Duchampian incorporation
of found objects into works of art - a style often associated
with artists like Rauschenberg and Johns - that seems to have
suited Samant's particular gifts. The result has been the life-size
worlds on canvas he has been creating. The materials that he
uses for his expression may be wire, paint, sand, moss, miniature
toys, and other artifacts. Early modern artists, inspired by
tribal art, pulled it out of the ethnological domain. Samant
produces art that is pushed back into it, as he induces us to
return to the dioramas of natural history museums. In his work,
the primitivism from Picasso to the Abstract Expressionists
seems to have come full circle, from “object without context,
to context without object” (Varnedoe). This contextualism
without object, another of his dualities, is part of a larger
trend involving Joseph Beuys, Charles Simonds, Nancy Graves
and others. Essentially, the attempt is to create the context
of ancient art and artifacts rather than the objects themselves.
His miniature civilizations on canvas appear as displaced dioramas,
and provide the obverse to Picasso's initial appropriation of
African sculptures as objects. Samant's demonstrations of primal
earth-body-architecture connections are personal and direct;
and his “little people” at first seem to combine a
kind of folk charm with liberating political ideals of a transient,
community-oriented art.
The last
layer in Samant's work, the superimposed wire work, adds a dimension
that works to subvert the merely decorative tradition in art
on its own terms. There is a delicacy of line in his wire work,
enabling him to achieve the fineness of line that only drawing
can, but on the painted canvas. The purpose of the wire work
is to hold the multiple layering of the canvas together, to
bind its diverse elements and traditions. In Mohan's hands,
it introduces a further dimension, one that evokes within us
a world of mythic proportions without resorting to traditional
decorative gestures. Decoration is the spectre that haunts all
painting, and part of Samant's formal mission is to find ways
to combat the merely decorative in art. There is a rigorous
discipline that goes into the act of painting for Samant. The
names he gives to his paintings reflect this larger-than-life
dimension of his world: Masked Dance for the Ancestors, The
Ghost of the City of Taurus, Retreat to Paradise Island, Celebration
of the Dead, Dancing Angels, Mother Earth, Medusa on the Moon,
Surya Vaunshi, Ashva-Megha.
Together,
painting and drawing interrogate the mirror images of the ancient
past and the distant future. His paintings explore repeatedly
a few major themes, some of which have been with him, in different
forms, for many years, and have developed a concentrated and
intense life. The scenes, whatever their subject, present themselves
dramatically: they are complex and vivid in tone and color,
and convey a moment of melancholy, an 'other' world before or
beyond this one. Groups drawn with the wire work populate a
plain in a lost or other world, forming a knot of intertwined
figures; anonymous mythical figures strain towards each other
over water which reflects an orange-yellow evening sky; floating
figures constituting a strange variety of travelers, engaged
in mysterious rituals, drift in an empty land. Water, sky, earth,
moon, sun, creatures, birds, men, angels, demons, monsters,
all coexist in Samant's worlds. Nature and culture cohabit the
matrix of possible and bygone worlds. There is an exchange,
and also a tension, between three-dimensional qualities and
the surface of the picture. The subjects are mysterious. These
are not 'narrative' or 'illustrative' paintings. Instead, Mohan
builds up a 'choreography' of forms and images. As he draws
his wires, each of 3 feet length, into a medley of heads, busts,
hands, his unconventional shapes connect one strangely to Indian
classical pictorial conventions. In some circuitous way the
wire drawings restore his connections with Indian art.
The charisma
of Samant's paintings lies in this connection with his past,
in the links it retains with Indian art through a reexamination
of the miniature painting tradition, as well as Ajanta cave
paintings. He brings alive the entire tradition of working purely
with lines (for linearity was once considered a key feature
of Indian painting). This technique allows Mohan to depict facial
features and postures on his own terms. It creates strangely
classical figures with elongated eyes, with the gesticulation
of curving fingers, or the tribhanga inflection of the figure,
without the tag of an 'Ajanta-based style.' It lies equally,
in its clear digression from the movement, in its bid to infuse
spontaneity and vigor, boldness and shocking color in order
to invigorate his art.
With this
work that is paradoxically drawing and painting, Mohan creates
for us, at the end, a disarming presence of the primitive in
the modern, of quasi-expressionistic textures and surrealist
allusions. His painted surfaces, ultramodern abstractions at
one level, are like archaeological excavations, and evoke lost
civilizations at another. The superimposed wire work, like delicate
drawings of the past, add a subtle 'choreography' and activity-oriented
dimension to his art-making, besides evoking other Indian traditions.
In the
end, Samant makes viable again the activity-oriented art that
is a central concept in non-Western societies.
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