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A colourful canvas of simple joys in life

Kirti Chandak’s latest works are a celebration of the pulsating moments we encounter every day but miss seeing in the rigmarole of our lives

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Amit Sengupta

In all its vividness: Works by the artist touch your innocence and your sense of belonging to nature and earth, the home and the world 

Kirti Chandak’s paintings are a departure from the ritualistic abstract art often showcased in art galleries. They are full of colour, realistic, depicting life’s simple joys, possibilities, trappings and poignancy, and they do not run away from the pulsating moments of life.

Some of the paintings do not even need a title, like the depiction of a young hawker with a bell selling the pink, soft, fluffy, cotton sweets which would melt in the mouth. As children we were told that the sweets come from moon because the shadow in the moon is that of a grandma weaving a charkha. She is also weaving the sweet cotton balls that stick to the inside of the mouth and leave a beautiful aftertaste. Indeed, the dense blue sea in the background only adds to the idea of this fantasy — the sea becoming a sky of childhood dreams.

The painting titled Evening Walk on Goubert Avenue is simply an extension of this painting near the sea and could be called yet another moment in what the Chinese term the “harmonious society”. The evening walk has all the elements of a happy neighbourhood who have come to inhale the refreshing north wind of the sea after a long, sweaty day at work or at home.

There is an old family, a young couple, a child playing and a child selling soup bubbles. You can sea the soup bubbles floating and you can also spot that this child is so solitary and without a family, out in the open, selling his bubbles which no one seems to buy. You can hear the birds in the distance and the tide coming to and fro. This is a perfect moment of an intimate, middle class daily retreat of the day into the evening, as the sunset descends over the sea. The intimacy of the people despite being strangers is carved out like a neighbourhood community project.

In all its vividness: Works by the artist touch your innocence and your sense of belonging to nature and earth, the home and the world 

There is a celebration of sunflowers in one of the remarkable paintings by the painter. They are not rooted or moving towards the sun. There is no sun, only sunshine, and flowers floating in eternity... Clearly, it is a Van Gogh-inspired painting but will take you a while to understand that.

A young girl with a sun-hat is taking pictures of the flowers. And what is the picture on her camera? That of a bearded Van Gogh, wearing his tattered hat.

Another clue are the crows. They move without trajectory around the sunflowers as if they would are looking for honey! Instead, it is only the typical Van Gogh effect in the painting full of sharp yellow and the black of the crows. Reminds of the film which great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa made remembering Van Gogh’s kaleidoscopic landscapes breaking out of clichéd colours, with one shot of birds cackling and flying away into a vermillion sky with blue and mustard flowers and fields in the horizon.

There is a method in Kirti Chandak’s effort to make it simple and lucid. The cows, in one of the stark paintings, also remind you of painter Manjit Bawa’s cows, but they are different. Lost in a holy land where they are worshipped. The blank yellow landscape of empty skyscrapers with crows yet again floating around reflect the barrenness and sadness of the times. The only relief is that there is no garbage dump and there are no non-biodegradable substances going inside the intestines of the cows.

Birth on my home, a titled painting, is again about a young girl trapped between the sky and a barren urban landscape of empty forsaken homes. The relief here is that the sky enters the doors of her little home which she holds close to her heart, even as some angels float in the distance. This is surely not avant garde art but touches your innocence and your sense of belonging to nature and earth, the home and the world, and to fantasies of childhood and beauty which seem to have been buried under the onslaught of mindless urbanity. The show ran at the India International Centre in Delhi till November 28.

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