catalouge for shyam Prasad, july2008

No Exit

“One cannot be free unless all are free”- Jean Paul Sartre

Though this quote by Sartre appears an impossible utopic vision, it actually brings forth the guilt every one of us has to live with. When I first saw Shyamprasad’s paintings and prints, what intrigued me is the feminine subjectivity in him. The female figure in his work is always the mother rendered as a faceless figure. What is significant is that she doesn’t become a personification or metaphor, rather stands as an ambiguity. She neither shows a negative nor positive force. His idiom is in between expressionism and realism. This makes his work open and closeted at the same time. Thus his works communicates neither information nor emotional sentimentality. Rather it brings forth the trapped human condition. One can easily connect it with Sartre’s titles of his plays like “The flies”, “No exit”, and “Dirty hands”. His works doesn’t promise any positive deterministic answer for the ‘man’ made atrocities where victims are made vulnerable and powerless.

His early works were generally either mask like figures or self portraits with some floral decorations filling the negative spaces. The way he handles his paint and motifs is very unattractive,* when we try to see his works from the specter of the gallery oriented art world. This haunting specter has left no option for the artists but be carried in its awe. The failures of radical alternatives outside the systemic structures have taught that confrontational aesthetics would be secluded and isolated and in the long run loose its own force against this giant machine of capitalism. The artists now have embarked upon the possibilities of working ‘within the given credos’ yet at the same time finding subversive extensions of their creative productions. This staying within the beasts belly can be seen as yet another strategy to survive the onslaught of the market forces. So this aestheticisation is nothing but strategies of survival.

Shyam’s work doesn’t permit any kind of such aestheticisation. It’s unattractive* ordinariness in rendering makes his work inconsumable and doesn’t end up becoming sensation bound. His loosely flowing lines particularly in his execution of flowers or sprouting branches are so flimsy* that it doesn’t define it and interestingly it works in an abstract level and creates a contradiction between the flower and blood stains. This is more evident in his etching “Rodin’s thinker with my flower seller”.
This ambiguity between something which is fragile and beautiful and something which is generally connected to violence and pain enhances a precarious space in his works. All his works are done in smudgy dusty tones of green ochre and grey. The only primary colour extensively used is red.

In his work there is always an immanent threat the child is to face. The child is recurring motif who is shown in a foetal position. Sometimes protected by a colacacia leave or is kept inside a jar or a flower pot or sometimes circled by a gigantic worm like form.
The images in his work doesn’t synthesis in a harmonic whole rather exist as fragments. This in fact works well in thrusting on an inexplicable fragmented existence. In most of his works he uses direct symbols of violence. The female and child are the victims and the pawn s of belligerent, phallocentric forces which is parochial and never permits a safe existence in a democracy.
His titles never talks about the tragedy [except one work which is titled as “lamentations”] but works as a mock at the upper and middle class aspirations for an unproblematic and optimistic world view and our unawareness about the societal ills and the lack of care for female gender. The thinker of Rodin is another leitmotif in his work which works as a symbol of an intellectual/artist and the failure to bring about any radical changes in majoritarian mental make up.

Rollie Mukherjee,
Art Historian,
Bangalore.

*Words like flimsy and unattractive are used in a positive connotation in his work.