For the past 30 years, artist Yusuf the former Director Bharat Bhavan Bhopal, Bihar Museum Patna has been creating abstract configurations that swim deep into the abyss of calligraphic modernism within the strokes of monochromatic abstraction.
Just opened at Aakriti Art Gallery in Kolkata curated by the brilliant art critic Prayag Shukla, this exhibition is a medley of minimalist moods and moorings that speak of an ethos and essence of understanding the scripted tenor that lives within us as individuals.
The radiance of geometry
The works are split into canvasses and pen and ink on paper. Amongst canvasses two works stand out for their compositional clarity and their radiance of contemplative idioms.The triangle is more than a mere symbol.Its inverted pyramid form culminates into a deepened zone of scarlet that glows brightly like a beacon in the apex of the painting while the black striations on the vertical emblem echo an emanation of both the living entities as well as tonal gradations of monochromatic mystery.
For Yusuf primary colours such as black in its primordial pen and ink renditions have been important investigations into the properties of colour. For Yusuf, within this vertical study , the push and pull between neighbouring tonalities is a topic as rich, multifarious and mysterious as life itself, the triangle as a study revealing deep truths about human existence.
In many ways symbolic, the second canvas created in buttercup yellow, is more like an allusion that seems to gesture towards the frictions between boundaries and the ensuing calmness , perhaps a drama of epic proportions play out in life’s battle of light and darkness that rises and falls according to its own poetic rhythms.
Pen and ink on paper
Yusuf’s pen and ink works on paper speak about the eternal motion of backwards and forwards.
We can sense that the spirit of the avant-garde runs deep within his veins. At the same time, however, Yusuf has always been fascinated by ancient Indian culture and tribal realms knowing his closeness to India’s great abstractionist Jagdish Swaminathan who lived in Bhopal for a few years. We can see that Yusuf immerses himself in the architectonic variations of multiple references bathed in the bliss of solitude .
His ability to create strokes that are similar to calligraphic modernism is that his core is fed by a silence of ideas that transcend human history.This in turn leads to thoughts on beauty, harmony, abstraction and form.
While the pen and ink works extend to us the chromatic lessons of Klee and Kandinsky, they also seem to chime with the currents of hard-edged abstraction and Minimalism. In studying Yusuf’s abstractions on humble tools like pen and paper, we see that he ultimately aspires to a language of timelessness, that if found at the core of universal truths. Like the great Josef Albers we can see that for Yusuf, the study of contours, and abstraction is ultimately a study of human nature; by observing the relationships between strokes and hues, we might begin to understand our interactions with one another.
The sparse forms of his paintings, organised according to minimal designs, allow contours to be observed at its most raw, highlighting the tensions that define how a particular stroke is perceived in the oldest tools of pen and ink. The show is a fitting corollary to the need for attention to be drawn towards the minutiae of everyday chromatic phenomena. Working flat on a table, we can sense how works could be enlarged and embellished in successive variations; or remain singular expressions of particular monochromatic ‘climates’. Each work in this exhibition is a chapter in a tale that might continue ; together, they span the full gamut of human experience, uniting art, and philosophy.
In the present works in the show , an age-old narrative plays out in soft gradations of colour and contour in the humble tools of pen and ink.Pure/amorphous forms and colour result in a variety of methods and techniques and the viewer can walk away knowing that abstraction is more than colour, it is more than mere strokes it is built on the great diversity in personality resulting in the configuration of interrelated, asymmetrical shapes embedded in an expanse of matte shades.
Yusuf’s ability to play with depth is implied by the receding blacks and advancing whites; however, they are held in check by producing an overall flatness. Shapes in abstraction for Yusuf are about highlighting and complementing skeletal framework.And between the lithe lines lives the gravitas of time past and present.
IMAGES : AAKRITI ART GALLERY KOLKATA
Facebook
Twitter
Linkedin
Email
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
END OF ARTICLE
Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.