Anjolie Ela Menon’s Revisitations that opens at Shridharani Gallery ,Triveni Kala Sangam in Delhi  is about the creation of  a coalescence of human heads and still life subjects born of a melding of visual narratives. Split into two parts the works have a suite of new works and a peek at her vintage family collection that will leave art lovers gazing and clicking at images they can gorge upon long after they have seen it.

For Vadehra Art Gallery’s Sonia Bellaney who has meticulously crafted shows of Indian masters for 39 years tracing Anjolie’s  journey is a sojourn to savour. Viewers can imagine a mapping of the internalizing of the influences of European Masters such as Heironymous Bosch and the French Romanesque sculptor Giselbertus who is an inherent part of her visual vocabulary.

Christ Heads and Pyotr

Anjolie’s Christ heads and Pyotr the portrait of the Russian Orthodox priest  are seemingly among her most evocative  and expressionist. Pyotr comes as a flashback of her stay in Russia .In these paintings, the mottled coloration of mineral tones evokes feelings of fascination. Christ created as an image in the tenor of her husband Raja Menon is one of her favourite subjects.The mention of Raja brings forth an angelic, coy smile from Anjolie and you silently admire the emotive essence of deep connections born of love  in a world in a web of wars born from races within races.

Still lives Chairs and crows

Her love for the subject of still life gives us so much to ponder over in terms of treatment as well as her supple hand of strokes that juxtapose the subject into a landscape of the mind’s eye. Stylistically, it exemplifies a high point in Anjolie’s stylistic pendulum of art and creative thought.According to her chairs are about silent stories and the crows that hang around her chairs are about the beauty of sentient creatures .Interesting how she blends the arc of abstraction into the realism of the crows that enchant.

Frenchman’s House

The piece de resistance in the exhibition is The Frenchman’s House.The chair in a mottled green flanked by a crow and a charismatic Kamadhenu which looks more like an enticing  self portrait is a study of interiors created in the insignia of the classic Rene Magritte. “ Look at the lizard on the table cloth,”she says in fiesty zest. At 86 years,  it is the vintage collection that tells stories about how she has had a lust for life and handled colour and contour as primary tools in her odyssey.

We can also see that all through her life she has emphasized practice as an artist  over theories of art even though her knowledge of art history is that of a pedagogue. Her hands-on approach continues to be one of the best ways for younger  artists to study and  deepen their understanding of how colour and contour functions in their work.

Mothers and children

In both sets we see her continuous capturing  for the mother and child series born of her love for seeing Byzantine Madonnas in France as a teenager. While she has  drawn new inspiration from ancient sources, she brings the subject forward in colours and a flattened perspective.She says Krishna and Yashodha and Parvati and Ganesh continue to appear within her evocations for mothers and children.

However it is the older work of her daughter in law Vandana  and granddaughter Madhavi  that creates its own symphony of time in a prism.

Lone lady in the verandah

A masterpiece in melancholy is November a panoramic work of a sari clad lady lost in the frame of abject loneliness as she sits and ponders about the past within the darkness of the empty space that is grand yet darkened by the depths of all that is vacant except for a pair of monkeys happy to be in its faded depths.The folds of the sari, the frame of the human figure each vignette remains the cornerstone of her love for the precision of contours and the understanding of colour. In 2010 in an interview she said: “ My inner nature is somewhat melancholic. I think this is a very Bengali tradition where   introspection and the dream state often result in the creation of music, painting or poetry. Beauty is born of anguish yet out of the essential pain of existence the cry of exaltation rings sweet.” This work echoes that melancholia in the vein of solitude.

Men in memory and poise

It is the people in her life who have served as a springboard for exploring what line and expression can do in her portraits.

A number of these portraits of men belong to memory as well as personal experience and are fashioned in quiet poise.In these frontal studies of men’s faces we can see what visual effects can be perceived from her personal perspectives.We also sense a keen understanding of colour relativity and depth of saturation or translucency.

This exhibition of old as well as new works is a testimony to how composition, colour and contour  reflects interactions well as  how context can dramatically alter the way  colour is perceived, an essential concept in understanding colour theory across ages.

One of the world’s  greatest  master mentors Josef Albers wrote :

“Our way of learning is doing.

Our point of departure, the material.

Our concern, our self.

Our goal, imagination.”

This is the bedrock of inspiration for India’s priestess of contemporary art Anjolie Ela Menon whose exhibition became a celebration of 75 years of Triveni Kala Sangam in India.

IMAGES: VADEHRA ART GALLERY

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