Stretching the Canvas

Artists push the margins of the canvas and take it beyond the easelnbsp;

A canvas turned into a shamiana or a scroll, a diptych that morphs into a metal sculpture or weaves in a silk skin, a canvas that serves as a comic book strip or a hoarding, a canvas torn and sutured or one that is decorated with tinsel and bindis. Even as artists revel in the experimental space opened up by installation art and digitally-generated images or the possibilities of performance art, the conventional canvas is also being reinvented.

One of the most promising names on the Indian art scene, Mumbai-based Riyas Komu, has always treated his canvases differently, evoking in them the feel of a hoarding or creating the texture of a surface beyond the canvas. In Waiting For The Bloom, Nothing Blooms diptych, 2007, he uses automotive paint and silk on canvas to create a sense of age and vulnerability along with one of desolation. 8220;Working with multiple media is exciting for me as an artist. It evokes a viewer-response that goes beyond the frontal view. I paint portraits, billboard-sized paintings that lionise the proletariat,8221; he says about the aggressive subjects of his posters young men who work with him at the garage where he creates his sculptures.

Fellow painter Justin Ponmany is now well known for his holographic paintings that explore, what he terms, plastic memory. The two things that fascinate him is the plasticisation of Mumbai and the salty air that works on eroding the surfaces of everything exposed to it. His canvases, with their shiny metallic appearance, are a step away from the conventional. Works like Salt Friends suggest change and urban decay without being literal. 8220;My work is spurred by the sudden moment of truth when everything collapses and only the threadbare nakedness of the weaving remains. I8217;m interested in taking painting ahead,8221; says the artist.nbsp;

One of the first artists to move beyond the conventions of oil on canvas was 64-year-old Baroda artist Nilima Sheikh. Her 1996 work, Shamiana, was a breakthrough in form. Six hanging scrolls of casein tempera on canvas and a canopy of synthetic polymer paint on canvas created the effect of a tent, a symbol of marriage, union and love.

The suspended canvases also affirm joy derived from community and oral traditions of hymns, evocations and incantations from Indian religious writings and of medieval sufi and bhakti devotional texts of Islam and Hinduism. 8220;I learnt from my guru K G Subramanyan of the plurality of art practice of the interdependence and interweaving of craft and folk practices with painting8230;The search for alternative modes of representation is something that I share, with Gulammohammed, my partner and fellow artist,8221; writes Sheikh.

Another young painter whose work is startling yet humorous is Navin Thomas. Thomas revisits the Amar Chitra Katha comics that we all grew up with and gives it an urban twist. The Bangalore-based artist finds ironic ways of commenting on our expanding horizons and our new global identity while quoting tales from the past.

In Future Tales, we see Garuda juggling phones in air as an amused Nandi watches. In another, Garuda sits by a river, while a man throws a spotlight on him evoking a movie set. Replete with speech bubbles and pixels, characteristic of comics, Thomas8217;s works are far removed from the predictable tropes one usually sees.

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8220;With its classical comic book style depiction, it started offnbsp;as a personal exercise. Since this section of work is of a storyboard style illustration, with speech and thought clouds, I leave it to the viewer to reconstruct the images.8221; Another artist working along these lines is Chitra Ganesh, an NRI settled in the US who is yet to show her work.nbsp;

Last but not the least are conventional painters who, within their oeuvre of abstract art, try to weave in a layer of gauze or a peeling of paint that no doubt has a dramatic effect.
An abstract painter like Sheetal Gattani finds she has always worked in layers. 8220;Now that I have switched to canvas it is interesting to see that instead of peeling away the paper, I am creating and adding paint and in some cases gauze,8221; she says.
As they say, the possibilities are endless.