How cool is Cool?

Red Earth presents an art show that it hopes will broaden the perspective of the Indian art enthusiast.

At the preview of Cool 5, an art show running in Mumbai, five young artists, quirkily attired, dramatically alight from a Victoria (open horse carriage).

Inside the gallery, cocktails with curious titles are being consumed. Like Bunty aur Babli, the whisky, blue Curacao, vodka blend that playfully pokes fun at big dreaming small town artists. "It's my idea of a cool event," says curator Himanshu Verma.

Verma himself is probably used to people thinking he is "cool". He is just as comfortable in a silk kurta as he is draped in a sari, and seamlessly moves from discussing the semiotics of disco music in eastern popular culture to organising a music festival celebrating the sarangi.

Known in art circles as the spunky young man (he's 27) who tried to renew interest in the literary pamphlet three years ago starting with a 40-pager on the unexamined aspects of metrosexuality, the director of Red Earth is now fully occupied with organising multi-disciplinary events that celebrate culture through open and occasionally subversive discourse.

Once again, with Cool 5, he is offering the counterpoint to conventional interpretations of cool Indian art. He presents five new artists, mostly in their twenties and specifically painters "" Verma's way of reviving interest in painting, which he believes is today sidelined by the interest in newfangled media art.

"I'm not saying the Bombay Boys and their ilk are not sexy. I'm just offering a different kind of cool," he explains.

The idea for the show was purely intuitive. "I got to wondering why we are restricted by only a certain kind of cool. Nobody actually knows what constitutes cool and that actually makes for a rather enjoyable confusion." Cool, Verma believes, should be more about celebrating difference than Western-driven homogeneity.

From Rohini Singh's gouache on old court fee stamp paper to the suggestive symbolism of Dileep Sharma's watercolours, pen and ink and paper, and the brazen dramatics of Rajendra Kapse's self-portraits in oil and acrylic, the show highlights varied personalities and varied styles.

Verma's curatorial style draws on nonconformity too. The artists were provided with no thematic boundaries, just the instruction to present work that shows them at their coolest.

Instead of individual artist biodatas, there are collages of unabashed photographs and amusing (and largely un-edited) Q&As, which include the artist's favourite underwear colour, dream date and personal perception of the word "cool".

The show draws as much attention to the personalities of the artists as to their work. Verma has deliberately chosen small-town artists for their cultural allegiance to a certain quality of Indian-ness, in idiom, technique and story. "The only way Indian art will make a true mark on the international scene is by being Indian," he says.

There's more than a hint of a suggestion that Verma believes the Indian art scene needs to cool off for a bit. The artists themselves allude to it. Kapse's Q&A suggests disillusionment with the arbitrariness of price inflation. Pratul Dash believes there is a lacuna in curatorial direction. "Even galleries have become commercial instead of cultural," bemoans Verma.

This isn't his first interaction with art. A Holi art camp (Verma typically organises events around Indian festivals) earlier this year had 40 artists exploring the possibilities that lay in indigenous Indian colours and art materials. Next up, an exhibition in New Delhi using light as the only medium of art, around, you guessed it, Diwali.

"This isn't easy," he admits, "there is still a lot of hankering after big names." But Verma has ambitious plans, big plans to introduce small doses of humour (or coolness) into Indian art. "I'll be back in December, as Santa Claus," he signs off ambiguously. Cool.