Lalu Prasad Shaw’s temperas are a revelation of mind and soul, compositions given the scrutiny have been subjected to contexts in which they have been used, we know much about its origins, or better, the occasion that gave rise to it, the history of its appearance. The best and most compelling of his works are ‘The Stories We Tell Ourselves’ at Art Exposure Gallery (January 11- February 5, 2019), that approach to an eclectic realm that leans heavily on his insights. In spite of his enormous erudition and sense of form and texture in his ‘Babu’ and ‘Bibi’ series, he puts the present together. There is a lot of truth in the traditionally held view of Shaw as a bridge figure between avant-garde and the emergent radical Indian Contemporary art of the 60s and the following decades. It is grand and oversimplified at the same time. Despite his vast contribution in the making of a language that marks the emergence of an Indian contemporary art in the sixties and seventies, his was one of the legacies to younger Indian artists who had looked at his art and then moved from it along very different paths carrying with them the bits of poetic explosion of his work. The present series can variously be interpreted as referring to psychological alienation as if he developed these ideas in isolation. The works are intended to provide a screen on to which the viewer projects his own experience provoked by the Master. The bareness of the image forces the viewer to consider the idea behind the non-event of the painted space. From the late 50s to the present, his personality expressed through his etchings, paintings, and sculptures has presented a challenging half-mocking conundrum to the viewer.
The drawings of self-location and the vessels of colour he painted here is minimalist in its mode. This painted ground, this rhythmic unity of senses can be discovered only by going beyond that gives his work in this exhibition, an eclectic fervour. In these works, one can see elegance and joyfulness as means of revolt, not an exercise of power but a tumultuous upheaval of limitation. Seductive yet austere paintings float weightlessly, unconstrained by necessity yet no less connected to material realm of natural demonstrating an element of disdain and sardonic charm; schematically his imagery seen with a linear gaze acts as a map of elegant fantasies – an attempt to set up a dialogue between our obsessions and private associations and can be read as an allegory. They depict a meaningless loss, transcending the development of means – an escape in his antiquated world. However, escape is toward the impossible world whose extreme limit assumes laughter, irony, ecstasy, terrified approach towards the end.
His ability to conjure up experience through the shape and weight of lines and rhythms of the composition are eloquent. One senses a working out of pictorial conventions; of attitudes and of free associations that swivel between dream and reality swinging between distance and intimacy; his works done in tempera deal with his own reassembling of an idea on a previously unseen realism he always aspired. In other terms, in another language, this would translate as the minimal hypothesis of the logic of the subconscious, that our psychic symptoms have caused, origins even that the dreams do not cheat with metaphor, and so it pays to be meticulous and rigorous.
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