Black Blue Yellow, the second in a proposed trilogy of ink brush painting exhibitions by T. Venkanna, follows up on the unflinching meditations on death contained in his 2017 exhibition Looking for Peace with a similarly trenchant exploration of sex. It draws on Indian and European myths, archetypes and artistic traditions while locating itself within a contemporary frame of reference defined by free trade, information overload, porn saturation, plummeting birthrates, and a global political shift to the right of which India is a striking example.
Venkanna restricts his palette to the three colours of the show’s title, with black frequently used to define figures, blue usually driving the emotional tone, and yellow providing compositional balance. The people in these paintings, as in many others in the artist’s oeuvre, appear to be in thrall to the pleasure principle, a desire for instant gratification of libidinal impulses that is by implication a central feature of societies today.
Black Blue Yellow reconfirms Venkanna’s mastery of scale. We see it in two-figure compositions like I Am Not Your Doll in which a domestic scene involving a battle-of-the-sexes scenario achieves planetary dimensions; in Godman / Madman which makes use of Indian miniatures and narrative pictorial traditions in telling a story of willingly gullible followers endowing a man of mesmeric power with divine status; and in the magisterial work that shares the exhibition’s title and involves hundreds of figures — including homages to or echoes of works by Manet, Gauguin, Matisse and Picasso — frolicking in a tropical Eden which is far from paradisiac in its details.
The most recent painting in the series, a Danse Macabre of garlanded skeletons titled Jashn, is the most direct political statement in Black Blue Yellow, castigating a society that can celebrate rape and murder. It links back to works from Looking For Peace and reinforces the fact that Venkanna is less interested in the brass tacks of copulation than in presenting a moral critique of our time.
- Girish Shahane
