Vikash Kalra never fails to surprise his audience. When he started an artistic career from the pavements of Delhi where he worked as a book seller, he never thought he would indulge in creating works in various mediums and in various fashions that challenged the pre-set notions of the viewers of art in general and that of his in particular. Kalra knew that he had to get out of the pavements and get into an artist’s studio though the materialistic conditions were not feasible for him to make a quantum jump into the unknown future of art. Hence, he started painting on the pages of the old journals that he had abundant in supply, a Tagore-like act, of erasures and additions. Kalra did not know the rules of colors so nothing stopped him from applying the colors that caught his fancy. The images that came out of the pages were captivating, first to him and then to the audience. Once he gained confidence, he left his career as a book seller and entered the fascinating world of art with his paintings that had the wild passion of the works by Georges Henri Rouault, the early 20th century French painter.
Today, when Kalra invites the viewers to take a look at the monumental sculptures purely done in industrial stainless steel, he has become a different artist, much evolved and confident in his verbal as well as aesthetical articulations. Before delineating the specialties of Kalra’s new body of sculptures, it is imperative to know the evolutionary paths that he has taken to arrive at this space. He still remains a painter though he has always taken interest in sculpting. With no indebtedness to artistic grammar or loyalties to the schools of aesthetics and thoughts, Kalra has been like an effective poet of free verse; something that alters the quotidian into expressionistic. Art scene anywhere in the world is a skeptical beast that sniffs many times before it accepts the friendship with a new artist. The skepticism comes from the fact that often the artists who show unconventional aesthetical prowess topple the set theories and accepted lingua of art dealing. It unsettles orthodox ways of looking at art.
When Kalra entered the art scene in late 90s, art people raised their brows at the kind of aesthetics that he forwarded through his canvases and paper works. Art historians and critics tend to find solace in easy compartmentalization so they called him an expressionist which was acceptable to begin with but when they called him an artist who treaded the path that Francis Newton Souza had already paved and made exclusive, it was a bit confusing for the artist. He was doing his paintings though he knew that they ‘resembled’ somewhat like the paintings by the modern master, Souza. Neither the style of working nor the intention of Kalra coincided with those of Souza. The problem was with the onlookers who were partly guided by the critics’ words and partly by their own ‘trained’ eyes. In those days, as an art critic I too was looking at many self-taught artists who lived in different parts of India. The common factors that I could discern in them were these that either they painted wildly like Souza (one could call it Souza-esque) or like amateurs who deliberately imitated other established artists or art styles.
Recognizing the autodidacts for their fresh ideas and styles was not really fashionable at that point of time, especially when they came from different zones of artistic existence. However, when I found the liberal ways of using colors and bringing forth extremely wild images both in figurative and abstract style were also a quality of Souza despite his disrupted formal academic education in art, I realized that these artists experienced a sense of limitlessness, an absolute freedom exactly the way the super genius artists like Pablo Picasso felt, which helped them approach their mediums without hesitation or fear. This boldness blended with feverish creativity, passion for life, upper hand of Eros in everything that they made their art distinct though comparisons with the masters came off and on, depending on the critical spectrum chosen by the critics and viewers.
Consistency is one issue that often raised by the critics when they looked at the works of the self-trained artists. In the case of Kalra, there has never been a phase where he was inconsistent in his works. After gaining confidence as a painter of wild expressionistic works where he explored the relationship between male and female human beings, placed amidst exclusive settings of the interiors as well as imaginary locations, Kalra went on to develop paintings in different scales without thinking much about the ‘sophisticated’ aesthetic tastes of the patrons. Consistency is the one thing that gained him the patrons who in turn became consistent in collecting his works though Kalra is a reluctant artist at times, taking time off from his studio activities and indulges himself in studying scriptures and writing interpretations of those works. His literary pursuits have taken him to write at length about a new theory of art, which he keeps as a secret, waiting for formal publication so that a wider audience could analyze and come to their conclusions about his theories.
Kalra is not compelled to make art either by the market demands or for the sake of making art. According to him making and not making art are two sides of creativity. An artist never stops to create art, it keeps happening in his mind, transferring those works into chosen materials is another thing altogether. What the viewers see as art by an artist is the manifestations in/through materials, but for an artist, it is a holistic thing; of thinking and experiencing and vice versa. This is one theory by Kalra and he also emphasizes the fact that he is a person who makes experiments in his personal life; he is into esoteric practices and controls his body and mind co-ordination through yoga and designed food habits. Living is also an art, says Kalra. If one has to love someone he or she has to transform and time travel to match up with the lover. It is not good to expect the other to reach you, you have to change yourself to fit into the scheme of life and love. Kalra believes that his art is about reaching the other, for the other also has the same wildness and expressions in him or her but often fails to realize that it exists. His works are the means to evoke such hidden areas in the other. It is through his art Kalra makes union with his viewers.
It is not for the first time that Kalra comes out of his studio with a body of sculptures. The more he gained confidence in his works and methods and materials that he used became varied the more he did works of different genres, at times letting him inspired by the masters of art history. He makes a clear distinction between inspiration and influence; inspiration is something that goads one to act and create art whereas influence is that force that makes someone take a look at oneself and decide on the methodology of action and creation. In this sense, Kalra is an artist who has taken inspiration and influence on his stride; he uses them amply well so that he could create art profusely, at the same time derive methodologies for such creations. When Kalra came across the works of Giacometti, the Swiss sculptor and painter, he was both inspired and influenced, and he went on to make a series of sculptures, of men, women and dogs as if they were picked up for the purpose from the image repertoire that Kalra had already created in his paintings.
II
The latest stainless-steel sculptures fundamentally differ from the earlier sculptural outings by Vikash Kalra. These monumental works are post-modern in nature, deconstructing and challenging the possible narrativizing of sculptural images. The sculptures that do not tell any stories are sculptures that stand like architectures in the contemporary times. Post-modern architecture that uses pastiche style, hand picking erstwhile architectural styles and mixing them up for divesting them of all the meanings in order to generate an absolutely different meaning, which looks like a ‘meaning’ in itself but does not signify much. Frederic Jameson, who has forwarded this theory of post-modernism clearly says that in the evolving economic conditions, post-modernism carries both positive and negative qualities, factoring a new reality that collapses any effort to make grand narratives and grand meanings exactly the way where financial assets are liquidated for the survival of a company through a factor agency.
Kalra’s sculptures stand like post-modern architectures, in the present context surrounded by an architectural space which is a combination of modern and post-modern styles. The stainless-steel surfaces of these sculptures, slashed and rearranged/constructed, evoking the cubist experiments during the Constructivist phase of Euro-Russian Modernism, however do not reflect the surroundings exactly the way a mirror like steel surface would do. The sculptures are not meant to reflect anything including their ‘truth’. They stand in their absolute object value, the quality of a pure structure/sculpture before allowing it to any further semiotic interpretations. Beyond the sculptural object-hood, they let the viewers discern the images that are in a way constructed or embedded in the construction itself, and they are the images of male and female human beings. In a couple of sculptures, they are fused into one, as if they were posing together for a photograph or even disinterestedly existing in one place/space, fused yet detached from one another. And in others, they are a single image of either a male or a female human being.
Before going into the art historical and theoretical nuances of these sculptures, it is pertinent to know how the artist himself embarked on a journey that resulted into these sculptures. According to him, the encounter with the material, stainless-steel was quite accidental. While visiting a fabricating unit run by one of his friends in the outskirts of South Delhi, he found how fabrication was happening there for other purposes. The material evoked something in the artist, which he never thought existed in him; an ambition to make monumental sculptures. Welded sculptures needed armatures and they function as the basic skeleton of the works. Kalra knew what the sculptures would look like eventually but he did not know how to create armatures for them. The initial experiments did not yield him what he wanted. Abandoning all those sculptures, Kalra went on constructing those armatures which eventually gave him satisfaction. Applying flesh and blood to those fundamental structures was easy for him for he knew the flesh and blood were made of steel and he just needed to weld them together to completion. Successful finishing of one work led to the other and Kalra became so absorbed into the making of these sculptures that he decided to put away everything aside in order to make them.
Artistic productions, whether they are paintings or sculptures, or works done in any other medium do not happen in a vacuum. They carry art historical continuities whether the artists are conscious about it or not. Some artists make deliberate attempts to pick up elements, ideas and approaches from art historical materials and some others are so immersed in their studies and researches that when they do their art the influences come to them. Yet another set of artists do art that actually resonates with the art historically relevant works because they come to the artists as a part of the collective consciousness. Here, Kalra seems to have undergone all these three conditions while doing this body of works. As I mentioned elsewhere, Kalra has taken a post-modernist approach of pastiche, where the language of Russian Constructivism as used by Vladimir Tatlin and Naum Gabo are picked up for his purpose. The Constructivist ideas definitely come to the artist first and the reference comes later. However, in Kalra the deliberation could be ‘accidental’ and ‘subconscious’ though the resultant works have got the predominant Constructivist feel.
Constructivism does not work on the idea of ‘construction’ alone. It constructs with the dominant material of the time. Steel is an industrial product that revolutionized the world as we see today. Despite the invention of different materials and methods, steel has not lost its charm or purpose. In the case of materials, steel touches everybody on a daily basis. The famous advertisement of SAIL, the Steel Authority of India Ltd, says that there is a little bit of steel in everybody’s life, with or without our knowledge. Our thinking, movement in a space, our life in the public and private domains are in a way designed and controlled by steel. Kalra brings in this factor while working with this material, which is contemporary, dominant and does not carry a meaning of its own. It is not a catalyst either. Steel is like water; it takes the form of the container. Stainless-steel takes the form of a steel product. Kalra’s work is steel and no-steel at the same time. It is steel when seen as a material of his work. But it is not steel when seen as an image. It is a combination of the material and image, and above all the style of its construction makes its material presence. Its monumentality is defined not just by its sheer size but by the presence of the material itself.
Post-modernism contains Constructivism in many ways. First of all, post-modernism has an immediacy with the time; it is temporal and also in a constant flux to generate its own meaning, while the efforts to make meanings are thwarted at every stage. Post-modernism opens up avenues for micro-narratives to manifest but the sheer volume of such narratives disperses the possibility of deriving a unified meaning. The reflective surfaces of Kalra’s stainless-steel sculptures, as aforementioned, dispel pure reflections of the surroundings, instead give an illusionary solidity, and invite people to see an absolutely different ‘truth’ about the art itself. However, Constructivism which finds its theoretical foundations in Cubism, does not fail to evoke the art historical links within the perspectival zone of Kalra’s works. Today, artists are generally on a hunt for new materials because the changing times demand the new ideas to be expressed in new materials as well. Most often such artists tend to create narratives around them. The uniqueness of Kalra’s works lies in their ability to arrest the narrativizing efforts and help the viewers focus on the works as a materialistic manifestation.
This boils down to a sort of formalism. Kalra orients his works between formalism and aesthetical expressionism. While his paintings yield interpretations, paving way to possible narratives, his sculptures done in stainless-steel obliterates narratives but places a sense of fragmented reality before us. These fragmentations are not just about the reflected surroundings, broken and distorted, but they are the realities of our own times, so fragmented and displaced, making it almost impossible to make sense. Vikash Kalra’s these monumental sculptures are emblematic of our times. They are monumental, spectacular, tall, constructivist and material based, establishing the late capitalistic contemporary logic of life.
JohnyML
New Delhi
Augus
Vikash Kalra is a self-taught artist and writer based in New Delhi whose work has been exhibited across India and is held in several private and corporate collections.