I am very confused. While gallerists across the country are complaining of virtually no sales and poor sales, and sales where artists who were selling for nine lakhs are now not selling for ninety thousand, why are they suddenly expanding outlets of their galleries to include the NCR? Common sense tells me that only one of the two scenarios can be correct. If business is indeed as bad as they would like us artists to believe, then why do they need to open galleries like chain stores? After all, paintings are not things one buys as part of a regular grocery shopping list (I wish people did, but…). Anyone coming to Delhi from Gurgaon can jolly well peep into south Delhi-based galleries to acquire their MF Husain or whatever they are buying.
But I am sure these gallery owners know something that they are not willing to let on. While we were all complaining about the art mart being bad, bad, bad, there was a quiet paradigm shift from collectors being the gallerists’ main targets to focusing guns on corporate conglomerates and their employees as the neo-buyers. These new guns on the art canvas are too caught up in their corporate cocoons to step out of the NCR, so Mohammad is moving the mountain there. Elementary from the point of what is seen will sell type of logic. And hopefully fresh talent will get a boost as the average age of the buyers keeps getting younger.
Talking of younger, I am part of a high-powered panel to grant fellowships to junior and senior levels for visual arts and the stories one hears from these younger artists and artists in the making, are so heart rending that it makes me want to cry. They come from places one has only read on the map, let alone having visited or even intending to. Lugging their work from all over the country, they have only one passion: To continue to work as an artist.
The passion and deep need or desire to work as an artist is one of the most unfortunate fevers to grab you. While the fever has the power to squeeze out every iota of life out of you to be the fodder at the altar of the arts, the reality of surviving as an honest artist is a saga of survival of the fittest. It is like that old Ajit joke about liquid oxygen: Liquid usko jeene nahin dega aur oxygen usko marne nahin dega.
And yet there are so many who want to become artists. What can one say? The worst part is that many of them are highly creative and more than deserving. The way they are surviving is pitiable. Of course, there are also mavericks who have not even done the work or the writing themselves but still want the fellowship.
One of the artists who has had his share of struggle, coming from a remote part of north Orissa, namely Behrampur, known for its exquisite sarees, is Asit Kumar Patnaik. He deserves special mention for he has walked the difficult path to emerge a winner. His show titled Retrospect and Prospects at the Chawla Art Gallery has works that are part of his earlier tried and tested repertoire and also his strides forward where he is not unsure or afraid to take the work to the next level. These new works on paper in mixed media use metallic colours with restrained abandon. Contradiction in terms? Not really. He grows from the bright, in your face figures whose sensual sexuality is palpable into sombre, introspecting thinkers that are stripped of external trappings. The journey of his colours does the entire gamut of the eternal dance where the reds give way to the ochres and rich chocolates to mature voices that beckon you to linger and hear them out...
Alka Raghuvanshi is an art writer, curator and artist