Colour me pink

Puneet Kaushik is an artist of disturbing insights into issues of the body, self and identity, Gargi Gupta discovers.

A solo show with just fiveworks, one would think, was a little thin on the ground. No, this is not to make a pejorative comment on the exhibition, Alterego, by Puneet Kaushik, which was up for just four days last week at the Gallerie Romain Rolland in Delhi, but to take note of the maturity and fullness of the artist's expression and his easy confidence in his audience.

Indeed, at the risk of sounding fulsome, there was nothing half-formed, incomplete or less than fully intellectually and aesthetically satisfying about any of the works on show.

To be sure, the works themselves were large, more installations than sculptures, the largest, "...Ensnare", being a dramatic arrangement of eight large meshes made of thin wire and hung from the ceiling.

They looked fine and evocative (metaphors of the fine webs of temptation, of deceit, the superstructure of human life, perhaps?) as I passed under them, the sunlight coming in from the tall windows of the gallery and casting a delicate sheen on the wires, making them look like a giant spider's webs.

"It's meant to be seen at night, with the pink focus lights casting interesting shadows on the wall," Kaushik insisted, as he went about trying to block out the sunlight, ineffectually as it turned out, with a bolt of pink cloth, draping it all the way down the glass façade that rose two floors high.

Pink, it appeared, was the signature colour of Kaushik's artistic imagination, at least in the present series of works. (In this, his palette has evolved from the reds, ochres, and browns that he was wont to use earlier.) One of the works, a grid of nine digital prints worked upon with acrylic ink and framed in glass with delicate etchings in glass marker, was even named "Pink".

"It alludes to the gay pink, to Nazi soldiers, is symbolic of AIDS, is an embodiment of the free spirit," Kaushik says of his fascination with the colour.

A commentary on the metrosexual man, this was a playful work where Kaushik used nude prints of his own body in various yogic poses or flying like Hanuman, set against digital prints of his earlier works.

One sees in this work evidence of one of Kaushik's primary artistic concerns "" the self, the human body and its psychic projection. It was a leitmotif of all the works at the show.

Take "Tying up in Knots", another of Kaushik's wire mesh installations where mesh ropes garb a skeleton fashioned out of slightly thicker wire; frayed edges of the mesh trail below, making it seem like the very embodiment of the ghost of a child's imagination.

But by far the most disturbing expression of Kaushik's meditations on the body and it's image is a work entitled, "Bodies in Space".

An imaginative manifestation of the notion of fractured, multiple identities, the work is composed of small glass boxes arranged one on top of the other. In one, you look through a tiny door at what looks like a human heart embellished with pink sequins; glass eyes in a bed of red paint stare at a tiny human head placed in a roll of what looks like the umbilical cord in another.

A tiny headless body, its torso split in two; the plump torso of what could be doll or a child, painted silver; two legs pointed to the ceiling; a woven bamboo bag, the kind used in temples, smeared with vermillion "" it's an odd rag bag of symbols, some associated with fertility, some primeval, some plain gory, that Kaushik marshals to get across a world of meaning.