High art vs high art

Paresh Maity and Satish Gujral are two very different artists. Coincidentally, both are showing important collections in the capital at the same time. Kishore Singh talks to both about what's new in their work this time.

You could imagine little in common between Paresh Maity and Satish Gujral other than that they are both artists. Both also "" if you stretch the paradigm a bit "" displaced artists: Gujral from what became Pakistan; Maity from, well, Bengal, though he has always considered Delhi his spiritual home.

For all that, Maity's is a peripatetic life, given to jousts of wandering across India and the world, while Gujral's has been a more rooted existence in the city after a long sojourn in Mexico.

While one is a senior in comparison to the other who is still finding his feet, what's amusing is the ambivalence with which people react to their work.

Both are highly stylised in their painting, both deviate between and from shows but keep vital links alive, both are pleasing to the eye and heart, both are iconoclastic. "But," asks a colleague, "do they appeal to the mind?" Hmm.

Neither Gujral nor Maity, it is true, challenge the new-found enthusiasm among some collectors seeking the global thrill for cutting-edge imagery.

Both paint fiercely, frenzied in their creation. And both have major shows on in Delhi at the same time that avant-garde Khoj is pointing towards new dimensions that break away from traditions that Gujral and Maity might subscribe to.

That clash between high art and high art is inevitable, but within their oeuvres, what is it these two artists are showing that is new?

Gujral's last public airing was a retrospective of his works at the National Gallery of Modern Art, "a milestone", he says, "because I could see the thread that bound all my works together" in a genre incomplete unless it also included collages, murals, brunt wood and, of course, his magnificent diversion into architecture.

Now, using the same thread, but with a wholly new body of work, his "Metamorphosis" show of canvas and bronze at Lalit Kala Akademi is on show till April 5.

"Others have called it waywardness," Gujral smiles affectionately at the barbs, "but I am always in a process of transition. When I feel I have reached a plateau, I say goodbye and work on a different style, a different medium."

So, even though "style becomes your identity," Gujral says he has chosen not to risk becoming stale, opting to "forsake that constituency" and accepted that "to lose one's identity is a challenge".

In a way, Maity's struggle is the same. "I look at my work very critically," he says, "I make myself do something different every time". Different? Maity? "Continuity," he says, "is important, the link should be there, the challenge is to come out with something new from the same oeuvre. I struggle to turn that something into a painting; it is a point that comes to me with every canvas."

Maity's current "" and coincidentally his 50th "" show launched at the Taj Mahal Hotel before shifting to Travancore House (till March 31) and thereafter at Art Alive Gallery (till April 15) is also his largest, with 50 works, humungous canvases, and a return to paper with large paper canvases where he layers rice paper, gold watercolour, conte and then brings his signature strokes to bear on them.

Part of his new motifs "" this, after all, is a show on Kerala "" uses Kathakali dancers, masks, elephants and banana flowers in a dominant way. His favourite form, water, returns in the state's popular backwaters with a series of watercolours.

"Mixed media," he explains, "is a lot of fun, but when you do oils" "" and in such sizes as a 5'x20' diptych, "you get lost."

Among the new flat colours in his collection this time is what he calls a kachcha or raw green. Gujral too uses a flat background for a large number of his works, but it is an austere, almost forbidding, black. Painted over these in the familiar Gujral styling, but almost minimally so, are "horses and bulls" as a "symbol of energy".

For Gujral, energy, motion "" these are elements of life itself. "Artists," he repeats something he has said often, "are not men of ideas, they are men of feelings." So? "These feelings," he says, "take certain imageries." Ergo,

the contents of his canvas, which are "indebted to Buddhist tangkhas in presentation. I have used large, empty spaces," he explains, "in a composition that on one hand gives the feeling of loneliness of space, but which is then destroyed by the motion of emotion".

Gujral isn't one to believe that an artist's early work is often his best. "In the long run, the more he matures, the better he does," he explains.

What Gujral does do is look at sculptures in any body of work as part of the three-dimensional aspect of his paintings "though no one is an exact translation of the other".

A perfectionist who often destroys his own work, Gujral might be appalled to learn that Maity's father has kept all his early works "" thousands of them "" rolled up as so many scrolls.

And just as Maity spends his day painting at his studio, treating it as so much work, Gujral insists creativity is a 24 hour taskmaster that you have to live "even in your sleep".

"It's not a dhandha for me," he says, "it's a part of my existence. It's the proof that I exist, like each breath that I take."

"All work," Maity differs, "is a spontaneous process." Fortunately for art lovers, that work, if not the process, dominates the end of the season with two important shows in the capital.