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Mohan Samant,
who first went to New York in 1959, has been living there permanently
since 1968, attending to his painting and to his music with
near-monastic discipline. Preferring solitude to company, Samant
claims that he steps out of the house only about 25 times every
year; almost each time he does so, he makes a pilgrimage to
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he spends many hours in
converse with the dead. The museum is a living environment to
him: the ancestral spirits of every nation and culture, with
whom he communes, seem to his to be more truly his confreres,
than are his contemporaries.
Although Samant was born, chronologically speaking, in 1926,
he is at least 25,000 years old. The past is an undying presence
in his work: the stony Mayas, their eyes fixed on death, coexist
with the warriors and the heroines of the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana; a parade of fire-breathing dinosaurs burst across
a futuristic landscape of holocaust. If Samant finds inspiration
in the Egyptian funerary wall drawings, he also turns for sustenance
to the Ajanta murals and the Rajput miniatures that so exercised
his imagination when he was a student at the Sir J.J. School
of Arts in Bombay, from 1948 to 1951.
With the “strategic depth” of the past behind him
(to invoke a military metaphor), Samant composes assemblages
that are in equal measure painting, relief, sculpture, found
object and wire work construction. In these works, the barbaric,
primitive force of the archaic self sparks off against the abstract
departures of a more sophisticated contemporary identity.
“We must address the monstrosity within,” asserts
Samant, whose work is in the tradition of Dubuffet and Tapies.
Like Tapies, who painted with a mixture of puddled sand and
paint, Samant brings a roughness and boldness of approach to
his handling of diverse materials; like Dubuffet (whose pates
were inspired by graffiti and crafted from tar, scratched glass,
sand and bizarre-coloured toys), Samant articulates a freight
of psychological violence. The ferocity of his semi-art brut
is tempered, however, by a compositional finesse of figuration.
Samant must have seemed a strange and powerful animal indeed,
to his rather more conservative and conventionally School-of-Paris
colleagues in the Progressive Artists' Group, which he joined
in the early 1950's. With his disdain for quietus and his expressions
of raw, warm vitality, Samant collapses the boundary between
High Art and low art: in his pictorial narratives the legends
of antiquity acquire a new spin and charge.
In his Death of Jatayu and Sita Haranam, for example, the forest
community goes about its ordinary life calmly, even as, in the
air above, Ravana bears Sita away and slashes at the brave,
aged Jatayu's wings - as though the forest dwellers were waiting
to read the news in the papers the following day. As in the
Rajput miniatures, a range of events, past and future, occur
simultaneously within the same frame; and, as in a Brueghel
painting, life goes on regardless of the epic, cataclysmic,
traumatic events that have revolutionised history.
It is this paradox that Mohan Samant celebrates: that an event
which will pass into the language of memory and metaphor can
pass unnoticed by those who should have been its first and most
sensitive witnesses. It falls to the artist, Samant seems to
suggest, to play the role of the sakshi: the archivist of unfolding
multiplicities.
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