art and deal magazine,april/june2008

Of Being and Nothingness
The representational world of Babu Eswar Prasad is an ambiguous site of unending tropes. Ambiguity shrouds the paintings via images/ objects drawn from varied sources like historical, popular, art historical and photographic. The viewers are made to respite for a moment from one image to another which leads to a stillness which is not silent. The sound is but not audible. This inaudibility is due to the flatness he thrusts upon the images along with their meanings. The flatness is an imprisonment of not just the objects but also their associate meanings. It moves you to a claustrophobic nothingness. The poetic space of clouds and sky which are referents themselves (drawn from Tibetan tangas or Buddhist scrolls) gives a hint of nature. But it seems a fake promise. The simulated environ though looks real is but a deception. The deception of it is felt when we are trapped in the vortex of interior with a fake exit. This is profligated by its opaque flatness that rejects your flight into the exterior. The moment you imagine to step out you are thrown inside. The paintings head nowhere. Existence is in captivity with meaninglessness or what can be said as overpopulation of tropes. There is an eerie chaotic noise that fractures the sublimity which the huge flat interior is supposed to create. This eerie sound is created by the human absence and the use of fragments. There is an antithesis between the simultaneous presence of stillness formally and technically constructed and the chaos of overlapping permutation of meanings.
His earlier landscapes had a joyous sublimity that takes the viewer to something beyond into the unknown fantastic world. But the present works creates a counterfit promise of this. It exists for a while but soon brings the viewer to the same place. In his earlier works one meandered from inside to outside and vice versa into the surreal world of impossibilities. The impossible architectures open up the space for free speculation. The images were like floating sensations. But now it is a trap. One wanders inside along with the objects which create a world of esoteric enclave. The historical gets trapped in the social, the social in the existential and the existential in the most basic of meanings. Space is trapped in time and the time within time and space within space. Meaning is not created as a whole but lies in its details. It brings different realities.
There is a constant play with meanings. Sometimes it’s in the analogy or in the interaction. Sometimes in isolation and sometimes get trapped in esotericism. It works like a “koan”. It never settles in a particular meaning making and always remains unconcluded and ceaseless and dispersed. Even the titles of his paintings highlight this contradiction and mystery. It’s the strategy of closure which Babu effectively utilizes to create an existential duality and its meaninglessness, its absurdities and illogicality. Everything returns to the now and here. There is no promise or possibility of moving out. It’s an empty fictitious beauty all around with simultaneous concrete existence of alienation and the claustrophobic boredom.
Rolliemukherjee


Videos
As a cinephile Babu’s engagement with the medium of cinema has maturely sourced out in his videos. A big collector of both parallel and popular movies his engagement with these videos has brought another fun loving and simple personality of Babu to the fore.
Notes from my diary is the first video by Babu done in a workshop conducted in Max Muller Bhavan in Bangalore in 1997. The video can be seen as an extension of his painterly language in motion picture. The presence of the being is relegated to the background sounds of noisy city life and other activities. What is seen is only the empty landscape devoid of any human activity. The shadows themselves speak for the life portrayed. The video is a montage of clippings from various films which are now historical classics. The play of shadows and light, the use of sound and silence, the absence of human are all the original sensibilities he has nurtured all through his artistic ovure.
“Splice” and “Dus ka bees” are two other videos which are strikingly in contrast with his painterly personality. Taking visuals from the popular cinematic imageries the videos are more a spoofs of the commercial genre of Hollywood and regional films. “dus ka Bees” is a take on the stereotypical representations in the regional and national films in India. The excess of sex, violence is brought within this short video by using the palimpsest of the cinema posters which adore the walls of the city. Cinema posters are generally aimed at generating the desire through clippings from the films. Machoism, titillating song sequences, romance and excessive violence are the basic scripts/ texts over which the most of the popular film genre dwell. This spoof replays the whole “filmi” with a background which is wonderfully collaged from various regional and bollywood films.

“Splice” is also a spoof of the Hollywood action thriller. It’s a trailer of the never to be made film. This mocks at the hypocrisy of the Hollywood which uses all strategies and technologies for marketing the desire. Here again the themes of sex, violence suspense are made fun of by using the same strategies. The anxiety generated here is a false one or it is about a film which is never made.
V.Divakar