Written in stone

Gargi Gupta visits a solo show of Nagji Patel, and comes away marvelling at the sculptor who's been working with stone for 40 years.

Two columns in black granite greet the visitor to "The Enshrined Object", Nagji Patel's latest exhibition at Delhi's Gallery Espace. Squatting on the floor, they rise tall (41 inches) and symmetrical from the ground, their upper end curving gently into three prongs.

Textured rough all over, the dark stone grey almost with the hammer, the two outer prongs of one figure have been polished black finish "" like a cap, or a nail, perhaps.

Similarly polished are two, gently rounded patches at the centre facing the viewer. Placed side by side they look, for all the world, like a pair of dolphins .

"Oh no, they are the god and goddess; the yin and yang, the eternal, primordial feminine and masculine principles," says Renu Modi, the galleryist, a little taken aback at my irreverent reading of an artist, who at 70, is one of the few remaining links modern Indian sculpture has with the generation of legendary sculptors like Somenath Hore and Patel's teacher Sankho Choudhuri, artists who forged (carved, in this case) a new vocabulary for the modern context.

I might be completely off track in my interpretation, but then a gentle benign humour, a kindly playfulness that invites the viewer to not just look but also to run his fingers over the smooth, almost sensuous sweep of the stone, is definitely an element in Patel's range of artistic effects "" the others, and much commented upon ones, being monumentality, use of the traditional Indian stone-carving and chiselling techniques in modern sculpture and a penchant for simple rural motifs and erotic totems.

Standing beside another work, a phallic shape with bronze rings on the side, Modi reports about how viewers have been drawn to the rings, giving them a turn as they passed by.

But then, playfulness is easier to achieve in smaller works; what is especially striking is the way even Patel's monumental, public sculptures (the exhibition has photographs of this work which has chiefly engaged Patel in the last decade or so, including a video of the installation of "The Abacus" in a Vadodara town square) also have a strain of the same.

Roobina Karode, the curator of the show, speaks of how in "The Banyan Tree", a monolithic public installation (20 feet tall, weighing 34 tonnes) in Vadodara again, has animal nests, fruits, birds worked playfully into the leaves of the tree in a way that evokes the harmony of existence.

Perhaps the only work that speaks of a new direction in the veteran and venerable artist's oeuvre is "Column" (a pillar of solid pink sandstone, topped with pieces of stone in a darker colour enmeshed in steel wire), which is placed at the entrance to the gallery.

"It's an experiment that I began with a work, again called Columns, which I did for a show in Bhopal some years ago, where I worked with loose stones, placed against a solid stone," says Patel. "Looking back, I think it was the Babri Masjid demolition that had me thinking about the dismantling of our heritage."

The exhibition also, perhaps for the first time, shows a large number of Patel's drawings. The development of Patel's skills with his chosen medium, mostly pen and ink, his growing confidence in his skills can be clearly discerned through the earlier conceptual works in black and white to the more recent ones in colour. But what's interesting here too is the way Patel wields the pen, in small lines and jabs. As he says, "I use the pen like a chisel."