The exhibition of the works, mainly acrylic paintings, of Vandana Rakesh at the Dhoomimal Art Centre is worth a visit if one wants to understand how to prevent images becoming symbols and retain the freshness of perception. This is an important lesson every artist should carry with himself.
There are symbols in her work. For example, there are two ugly swastikas in a work of the sun-worship series glaring down at us as they do from walls of grocery shops announcing shubh labh (auspicious gains), but mercifully, there is only one such work in the show. It could have been kept out.
There are influences, too, in her work, both Indian and foreign like those of Klimt and Jai Zharotia. But her best works reflect her facility with creating mobile images that have a powerful tactile quality without losing the softness of form and transparency of her technique of applying colour. Also, it is interesting, how, in the spontaneous evolution of her paintings, primaeval images and symbols emerge naturally as pure form.
This is evident from her paintings of a man (master) and woman (follower). The theme reflects a conventional relation consciously. The man as master emerged only with plough agriculture and feudalism. There is nothing natural about male dominance of patriarchy. Also the influence of Klimt and Russian icons is there. But what is interesting is how the formal composition of these works hangs on the ancient Egyptian and Chinese ideograms for the human being. The artist was unaware of this, but in her search for creating a compositional framework to represent a man- woman relation, she chanced on an ancient abstraction that is paradigmatic of humanity rather than man or woman. But the symbols are so well-clothed in the image that they do not offend the eye.
Vandana?s works, at their best, as in Angel, reflect her capacity to string together images: in this case, a phallic horse with a woman astride it and a soft bird like figure following them in the wake of a transparent yellow fabric flapping in the wind. The narrative is a creation myth, but one so subtle that it emerges only after the formal sequence is perceived.
Vandana Rakesh is an artist whose work draws deeply from life, digesting both industrial reality with our rural variety in a manner in which the universal and particular do not confront each other, but create new harmonies.
Indeed, that is the basis of good art and Vandana has it. She has yet to develop an advanced philosophy of her own and a visual language to go with it. Still she is an artist whose work needs to be looked at with the seriousness with which it has been created.