Baby-ji comes to town

All painters paint from life, but few bring to their paintings the grotesque humour of A Rajeswara Rao.

A Rajeswara Rao is the painter of middle India, of that vast chunk of the Indian population caught in the middle "" between city and village, between shabby poverty and garish prosperity, between earthy local traditions and what they see on TV and in multiplexes of Bollywood and Hollywood.

You see them in malls and multiplexes "" tottering out of swanky cars in too-high heels; spilling out of expensive dresses, decked out in branded baubles.

At his home in Hydergudu, a little distance from Hyderabad, Rao sees them everywhere. "Most of the people here have come into crores after they sold their land to real estate developers. But being mostly uneducated, they don't know what to do with all that money. So they dress like film-stars, drive expensive cars, live in palatial houses with swimming pools," says the soft-spoken artist who recently had an exhibition of his paintings, titled Baby-ji, at the Gallery Espace in Delhi.

These upwardly mobile village folk were the spark that set off these works, but Rao is quick to add that he isn't poking fun "" "Coming from a small town myself, I know how far I have travelled from my village." Certainly, the dual pulls of being and becoming, of seeing and showing off is something few Indians can claim to be entirely immune to.

But if there's social comment in Rao's paintings, it's subsumed in the wonderfully cheeky and kitschy "" very south Indian cinema "" style. The eponymous "baby-ji", something of a big little baby, grins out of the canvas in "happy birthday baby", decked out in gajra and diamonds in her hair, which sit incongruously with her dark glasses and striped T-shirt.

Or the grinning hairy face in trademark goggles in "cheers baby cheers", which combines grotesquerie with joy de vivre. There's a lot of the fun also in the titles "" "catwalk with fat back", "pati, patni aur gay", "a mole on the top right; a mole on the left bottom" (a huge, 4'x4' diptych of a bustier-clad bosom with a mole above the left breast and another of the fishnet-stockinged legs of the same figure).

But if Rao's content is interesting, his reductive style of painting is exceptional, giving an almost corporeal feel to the figures and faces, and a wealth of depth and texture to the backdrops.

Rao paints with acrylic colours on the back of acrylic sheets, layering them with single colours, black first, followed by blue or green or brown, and then scrubbing away to leave behind a hint of pigment or to bring out patterns "" the final effect depending on whether he's used a rough wire brush or a thin blade.

At times, he lets the paint drip or sprays blobs of silver or gold paint to bring about an illusion of relief. It's a painstaking method, with the artist having to work again and again on the basic sketch until the barebones of his form become apparent.

"I have been developing this method," says the artist who trained for a while under Laxma Goud, "for the past 14 years. Earlier, I would use four-five acrylic sheets, a different sheet for a different colour, and then put them together. It gave a wonderful three-dimensional effect.

But then, every exhibition I had I would have to explain, which layer came first, which second. I got thoroughly tired of it. Also, I felt that people were becoming too engrossed with the technique and paying little attention to the content." With this exhibition, Rao has clearly achieved a composite of content and style.