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Journalism of Courage
To quote English poet John Donne, “time doth tarry” in Abir Karmakar’s paintings. There is nary a human on the 10 canvases in his new exhibition, As It Is, underway at Delhi’s Nature Morte gallery (on till October 5). Yet, the human presence is all-pervasive – in the non-descript corner in Room, in the light filtering through the ghul-ghooli (small wall vent) in Sky Birds, under the wall-mounted fan in It Was Home, on the soft dunes of the vast desert expanse in Ancestors and along the cloud-like green foliage of A Promised Land.
The last time Karmakar painted human figures was in 2010, with the exception of his Covid series in 2020. “I wanted to bring a certain kind of abstraction into my practice. But my work has always been about the humans, the body,” he says, adding, “The body could be an individual but also a couple, a family, a community or even a culture. But, when you don’t paint the human figure, you open up more areas of discussion.”
For instance, in Room (2025), the artist trains his lens on an innocuous corner. Karmakar recreates the sparse scene in exquisite detail. The two converging teal walls each have a window sealed shut. Somehow, the desolation underlines the life that once inhabited the space.
The corner belongs to Karmakar’s room in his now-empty childhood home in Siliguri, West Bengal. “I grew up in that room. It has a lot of fond memories. But now, when I go there, I no longer feel that connection with the space. It has become a living carcass of my memory. It symbolises the loss of my former self,” he says.
In It was Home 3, he paints an empty kitchen. You see the countertop, the vacant spaces underneath, as a beam of light from a hole in the wall illuminates the room. This time, it is a home, left behind by a tenant, in Baroda, where the artist currently resides. “What happens when you build memories in a rented space that you eventually leave? Do they continue to connect with the space as they used to, when it was their home?” Karmakar wonders. For him, every painting he creates is a possibility – for the viewer and for himself. “A work is successful only if it has possibilities. If it doesn’t, it’s dead. It’s the unanswered things that make you come back to the piece again, and restart the journey,” he says.
Karmakar, who trained in painting first from Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata and then MS University, Baroda, works exclusively in oil paint, having briefly explored videos and sculpture. “Oil is my language and I like limiting myself to it and then trying to expand it. Limitation is the best thing actually. It allows me to explore more, dig further. That is my understanding,” he says.
Known for his immaculate style that renders his work hyper-real, Karmakar’s self-portraits, which he painted in 2005, epitomise Dutch-American artist William de Kooning’s famous remark: “Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented.” It, however, stands equally true for the empty spaces and landscapes he recreates, breathing life into them with every stroke. Experiencing the expansive seven-panel work Ancestors, which he created over a span of an entire year, is akin to finding yourself amid miles and miles of sand. “There was a subtitle to the piece which wasn’t included – the ever-changing landscape of our collective memory. When I was making this piece, I was thinking about who our ancestors were… about how there is a conscious manipulation of public memory by the state or by the powerful through media, movies, etc,” he explains.
If Ancestors is about the past, A Promised Land encapsulates the constant yearning for a brighter future. The blueprint for the work was an image of clouds he clicked during one of his flights back home. As he developed the work over a year, there were several news items that permeated Karmakar’s thought process. Among them was the story of an Indian family of four from Dingucha, Gujarat, freezing to death while trying to cross into the US from Canada illegally. “What interested me was this dream they had in their minds when they decided to take this drastic step. Because this was a voluntary decision. Most people who cross borders like this are not poor. In fact, according to Indian standards, they may even be considered rich,” he says.
As he zooms out his lens from the intimate, almost voyeuristic, escapades into the personal to paint the bigger picture in these two works, one becomes cognisant of the amount of time that has passed. After all, “time doth tarry”, but it never stands still.
