Ashish's Photography

Islands of Light

Exhibition of Photographs
By
Ashish Dubey.

8th to 25th Aug 2014 extended upto 25th Sept 2014

Apparao Gallery
Chennai

“Absence is a house so vast/that inside you will pass through its walls/and hang pictures on the air”
-Pablo Neruda Can absence itself be a form of presence? If that idea seems impossible to comprehend, then perhaps one may begin by dwelling at greater length on what we mean by commonly understood notions of presence and absence. Does the absence of physical manifestation denote absence or is it an absence at just one level? Taking it further, is absence the inverse of presence or is there some other less dichotomous way in which we could understand this absence-presence relationship?
This the central question posed by the works of Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) and Ashish Dubey in the exhibition ‘Islands of light’. Belonging to two completely different generations, Mohamedi and Dubey’s works complement and enhance each other while dwelling on the deeply philosophical question of self, presence and being. For both these artists, ‘less is always more’; a thought that has affinity with the mystic tradition of the Far East.
A key aspect of Zen philosophy and aesthetics is the belief in the power of absence. According to the Chinese master artists, ‘Figures, even though painted without eyes, must seem to look; without ears, must seem to listen…. There are things which ten hundred brushstrokes cannot depict but which can be captured by a few simple strokes if they are right. That is truly giving expression to the invisible. ’ The Far Eastern artists, who incidentally were often scholars of the written word too, thus brought to art a spiritual reverence for the silence and absence enclosing images and words. This aspect becomes all the more striking if one were to juxtapose a Western work of art next to a Chinese masterpiece. While in a Western masterpiece, the negative image (or the background) is merely considered a support for the positive image or form, in a Far Eastern artwork, the background is considered as important to the total experience of the painting as the positive image itself. One can discern a similar relationship between form and experience in Mohamedi and Dubey’s work too.
Nasreen Mohamedi has a unique place in Indian art history for pursuing a line of high modernist inspired abstraction at a time when all other Indian artists were exploring figuration. Drawing inspiration from Zen, Islamic art and architecture, the desert, the ocean and the urban jungle, Mohamedi created an art that was distinguished by its minimal appeal. Her art stressed on the freshness of vision and perception as she wrote “Break/Rest/Break the cycle of seeing/Magic and awareness arrives.’ As a result of this rigorous attitude to image making, her ink and pencil drawings as well as photographs (which she did not exhibit in her life time) display the precision of architectural drawings. Yet there is an extremely lyrical element to her work as she placed the line in silent white spaces to create a sense of movement. This movement had both a visual as well as mystical dimension as she associated movement with a sense of spiritual unravelling. In the words of Geeta Kapur ‘Marking the space of the sublime, her work is a form of prayer, utterances spreading over the surface of a lake, field or desert.’
Ashish Dubey’s works too have an extremely poetic quality as he uses the line to create forms that pulsate vividly on the surface. However compared to Mohamedi’s work, there is a more open organisation of form in Dubey’s work that allows the viewer to perceive the forms both as separate images and as parts of a whole. There is an organic element to his work as his forms seem to use nature and its stark beauty as a starting point to create linear abstractions. An effect of calculated randomness is evident in these prints as Dubey rhythmically repeats forms while introducing slight changes in them in terms of tone and construction in order to keep the freshness of perception alive. ‘Nascent and ebbing with the dying light’, these images are memory traces which speak to each viewer differently. Consciously engaging with a cyclical thought process and imagery, Dubey’s work reveal a constant state of becoming through absence and negation.
Islands of light brings together the works of two artists who are separated by time and space. This is not just for the sake of visual comparison as its curatorial intention is also to bring into play the Zen notion of Existence, where things and beings exist as entities in themselves devoid of connotation of association and thought. While this exhibition seems to be premised on a comparative framework, its ultimate intention is to make the viewer perceive each artist and art work for itself. This contrariness itself is a part of the Zen attitude. Just as the ‘mind is sometimes manifest precisely, in aspects of mindlessnesss ’, one might perceive the thing-in-itself through what is holistically linked to it.