<b>Kishore Singh:</b> The colour of motivation

Atul Dodiya focusses our attention on techniques that have been part of world's visual inheritance

Atul Dodiya is an intensely visual person who wades into extremely personal territory with his current show in New Delhi (parts of which he has exhibited earlier) with “girlfriends” such as Olga and Gertrude and various others unnamed from such diverse places as France, Germany, Italy, Egypt, and, in India, Santiniketan and, closer home, Ghatkopar, a Mumbai locality where he has his studio. Is Dodiya making a fetish of his past? You could be forgiven for thinking so, and the exhibition might appear like a private memoir until you realise that the cheeky girlfriends he alludes to are artists who have inspired his work. 

Dodiya has never quite eliminated his roots and influences, wearing them often on his sleeves with a sense of delight. Where others have abjured inspirations from artists who they may have otherwise admired, Dodiya boldly turns them into his muse, referencing them in his body of work, of which his current Girlfriends is but a part. He has turned to portrait painters — or, at least, painters who have also made portraits — and drawing from their style and manner, he, in turn, has developed a series of likenesses that take from these originals, but are distinctly apart in the manner in which he adapts their work to his own. 

Among those he picks as his artists of choice are Italy’s Piero della Francesca, using the artist’s Legend of the True Cross as his reference to create a bold and graphic series of images in which the portrait itself is subsumed to the style. With Francis Picabia of France and Albrecht Durer of Germany, Dodiya hones his skills further, as he pays homage to these masters spread across four centuries. But Dodiya is not done yet, choosing to delve deeper in time with Fayum “mummy” portraits from ancient Egypt — even resorting to painting his wife, artist Anju Dodiya, as one —thereby, ironically, creating a segue between those dead and the living in a room (actually rooms) full of people gazing across at each other, the memorialised among the alive. 

A scene from Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross. Photo: Reuters 

Nor are all of Dodiya’s motivations international. Closer home, he turns to Rabindranath Tagore whose melancholic portraits — especially of his sister-in-law, Kadambari Devi — are haunting, and probably the earliest examples of psychological representations in the country. Done in watercolour, they exhibit a darkness as well as vulnerability that makes them evocative. As if to offset this, and suggesting a sardonic sense of humour as well as recognition of artists outside the ken of popular recognition, Dodiya picks an uncelebrated Ghatkopar artist as his sixth muse, drawing on bazaar culture and a derivative aesthetic to wind up his ode to the painted likeness. 

In a break from more seminal works where he questions our associations with the portrait, Dodiya, here, focusses our attention on artists over the centuries who have impressed him with their individual merit. Nor is he content to pay lip service to them, turning some into personal mediations. If Francesca’s frescos have the quality of calendar kitsch which he combines with bazaar laminate, Dodiya attenuates the mural-like sensibility by distorting the portraits with spottings of crimson, a condition he accords with his wife’s vitiligo, patches on the skin that he dares suggest are not unlike floating clouds that, far from scarring the sky, draw attention to its expanse and colour. 

In the end, he focusses our attention on techniques that have been part of the world’s visual inheritance, but which remain unacknowledged in our contemporary consciousness as well as unconscious memory. In turning to these, Dodiya takes a leaf out of history and serves it to us like an album, letting us flip the pages to pause where our instinct most demands it.
 

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated