The most important thing about any art work is that it resonates the distilled experience of the artist at the time of its creation. The time taken to create a work may be relatively short, as is often the case with drawings or pastels, or longer in the case of oil on canvas. However, every moment of creativity reflects the experience and training of an artist.
The recent exhibition of Anil Karanjai at India Habitat Centre in the capital is more than just a memory. A Bengali artist from Benaras, who was an active member of the Hungry generation of the 1960s and a friend of Allen Ginsberg of the Beat generation, his greatest quality is the way in which he emerged as an artist with bright colours of the psychedelic generation. Karanjai settled down for an art that was mature in content and sensitive in form, which he executed masterly.
The most important aspect about his art was that he made it a medium for his rebellious spirit to continue. If his work of the 1970s evolved around the hard-headed stone figures in monuments that may not bear their names, but will never abjure their presence, his later works enshrine haunting natural formations, menacing boulders and crumbling buildings in the process of being taken over by weeds and wild grass. In a sense, he celebrated the collapse of the structures of grandeur; his gateway to the house of Kusma Nain, an ordinary rural woman, was no less grand than palaces and tombs overgrown with weeds.
His outwardly serene works with their smoky blue, earthy ochre and glowing green showed us the battles fought for space in a world where self-conscious monuments of grandeur crumble into dust?a shadow of what they were. Looking at his works, one may be forced to conclude that the more things change, the more they stay the same. And with change, the moment to moment struggle to give it direction cannot be ignored.
This quality of Karanjai sustained throughout his works, though his medium of expression underwent many changes over the years. And it was this very quality that gave his work authenticity. That is why his exhibition still harbours the same freshness his works had when they were first drawn and painted. Indeed, if for nothing else, the continued contemporaneity and relevance of his work draws one to it today as it did before.
In Remembrance, the exhibition being held at the Palm Court Gallery, India Habitat Centre , New Delhi ends today.
?The writer is an art critic