The other side

The last time I went to the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in New Delhi, which was a few weeks before the lockdown was announced, the guard appeared harried. A visitor before me had refused to put down his credentials in the entry register. “He didn’t want to touch the pen. He said it might have the virus. You tell me, how can this have the virus?” he vented. I nodded sympathetically as I made an entry in the register, wondering for the umpteenth time why in the first place the national gallery had to follow this sarkari practice of making visitors put down their names, addresses, and phone numbers before being allowed in.

Anyway, those were early days of the Covid-19 virus in India and the situation hadn’t blown into the crisis it is today. But for the public announcements at the Delhi Metro stations, which had caused some people to start travelling with masks on, I hadn’t encountered any kind of worry or alarm over the virus. So I soon forgot about the guard and his complaint as I made my way to the exhibition I had returned to, yet again: A retrospective of French artist Gérard Garouste.

This was the third time I had gone back to see Garouste’s large-scale, fantastical works at the exhibition, which was his biggest outside Europe. For the first time, nearly 50 paintings of this influential French artist, who is now in his 70s, had travelled this far. Some 40 years of his life’s work was on display at the gallery. It was a treat, a haunting one that kept drawing me back, and I had intended to make at least one more visit before the show closed on March 29.

And then, with five more days left of the exhibition, the lockdown was announced. Garouste, who had come to Delhi for the opening, and had stayed on for a few days after, had thankfully gone back home weeks before that (he lives and works in Paris and Normandy). But his works… I wonder if they are still there in the gallery, which, like every other public space, is now closed. If they are, what an exceptional situation this is for an artist. But then, what an exceptional situation this is for all of us.

One particular painting of Garouste has played in my mind repeatedly over these days. It is called “The Other Side”, which was also the title of his retrospective. Created in 1999-2000, this is perhaps not the most memorable of his paintings from the show. Compared to the other works, which pull you in or reach out to you, this one is, both in terms of scale and treatment, rather low-profile. It shows a giant figure draped in a robe standing on one bank of a flowing river, with his fingertips touching the other. In the background is a bridge, which the accompanying caption describes as something that “creates both a link and a distance, a new point of view when we cross it, if only to see the side from which we came”.

In Jewish philosophy, crossing over is about looking for your destiny and a lot of that philosophy appears in the artworks of Garouste, who literally did go to “the other side”. Born into Christianity and to a father who despised Jews, he later studied and embraced Judaism. Garouste, who has dealt with mental health problems for much his life, talks of this in his deeply personal and disturbing autobiography, A Restless Man: Portrait of the Artist as a Son, a Madman, which I have been reading way too slowly in a hopeless attempt to capture every event and emotion expressed in the sentences.

Crossing over, as expressed in his works, is a thought that has stayed with me. In our lives, we all do this crossing over, sometimes more than once. At times, consciously, purposefully. At other times, just going with it as the years pass. Such as when we become parents and childhood becomes something we then gaze at from the other side.

In these days, when life is as though suspended, I feel like a person standing on that bridge from Garouste’s painting. Neither on this side nor on that. The view from this bridge is just a farrago of images: Covid-19 headlines; masked faces; hungry, desperate people; social media pictures of mouth-watering culinary experiments; birds in the balcony; stars in the once smoggy Delhi sky; soap; sanitizer… 

We are clearly leaving behind a world as we have known it. Or so it seems. But what is that world that we are heading toward, one that we might arrive at once this crisis blows over, whenever it does? And what will our view from there be when we look back? Who can say?

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