A Surrealistic View
Artist Raghava K.K. reimagines the 15th century classic painting by Sandro Botticelli.
Mumbai has its very own Guernica. Artist Raghava K.K.’s Guernica 2.0 exchanges the chequerboard palette of Pablo Picasso’s original for a blast of colour and pastiche of art history references. Yet its underlying persuasions, just like the base layer from the complex modern classic, remain the same.
Viewers familiar with the 1937 mural will recognize several of the elements: an equine body, the large gaping eye in the middle of the canvas, newsprint, a lamp held aloft by a disembodied arm, and beneath it all, a splayed corpse. The chaotic upshot of the original is amplified by the appearance of real and fictive personalities from pages of history. The French Romantics are represented by Eugène Delacroix’s bare-breasted Liberty Leading The People, and the Indian Modern period by Mahatma Gandhi. Juxtaposed with these are pop-culture figures, including Taz the Tasmanian devil from the cartoon show Looney Tunes, a deranged-looking version of the tiger protagonist of Bill Watterson’s Calvin And Hobbes, and an autobot from the Transformers franchise. Much the same way as Guernica responded to the bombing of the eponymous Basque village during the Spanish Civil War, Guernica 2.0 makes a passionate pacifist plea by encouraging viewers to return to Gandhian ideals.
The mural is the centrepiece of Raghava’s latest exhibition, Ridiculous Copycats, a suite of 16 canvases. The exhibition is showing at Mumbai’s Art Musings gallery after a week-long run at the Jehangir Art Gallery, marking the artist’s return to the city after a nearly three-year hiatus.
His previous show, That’s All Folks!, borrowed its title—along with several characters—from Looney Tunes and its echoes are evident in Ridiculous Copycats. “The title comes from the idea that all innovation springs from an error in code and replication," says Raghava in a Skype interview from California, US (he divides his time between New York, San Francisco and Bengaluru). “Evolution is a treadmill, not a ladder, and is constantly responding to the environment. It is only the error that causes diversity and allows a species to survive."
His accomplished canvases reflect this happy miscellany. The Gelusil pink and black world of Another Knot In The String Of Time, A Good Three Minutes Ahead Of Me, for instance, is populated by a floating Rajinikanth, an armed Powerpuff Girl, Olive Oyl from Popeye, a golliwog, and assorted bug-eyed monsters. The title is one of several references in the show to former US poet laureate Billy Collins—this one is a line from I Go Back To The House For A Book.
Raghava was introduced to the poet’s work when the two collaborated with musician Paul Simon two years ago. “(Collins and I) started taking about the politics of aesthetics," he says. “His poetry is not verbose. His imagery is accessible, and the mundane becomes profound through juxtaposition. It made me revisit my own work."
These oddball juxtapositions often subsume the large central figures that occupy most of Raghava’s work, whether it is Sandro Botticelli’s heroine from The Birth Of Venus, stock figures from colonial paintings, or a Raja Ravi Varma portrait. Instead of the mundane turning profound, these playful cross-connections lighten the stodginess of these loans from classical or renaissance art. They offer a lopsided perspective, akin to looking into a trick mirror.
The Real Vandals Are The Restorers is an illustration of that. Raghava’s Venus is clothed, unlike the coy Botticelli nude. The title is from Madmen, another Collins poem about the art of composition and the destruction of art. So it’s possible to interpret the presence of Hanuman, holding aloft the Dronagiri mountain, in the background as a cue to the way religious fundamentalists push for film and art to be sanitized.
Viewed in isolation, Raghava’s motifs call attention to themselves—the works acquire meaning only through accretion. “I like to see multiple truths emerge and coexist," he says. At the Jehangir gallery show, viewers with varying degrees of visual art literacy asked him what he was trying to convey. “I told people that you have the right to interpret it the way you want. Different parts of our lives exist together. One minute you’re watching a Govinda movie, the next you are arguing about an existential question. I can appreciate both Rajinikanth plots as well as Shakespearean dramas."
Eventually, it all unites with the way Raghava attempts to understand India. “We are an impossible democracy," he said. “Nothing defines us and we have a 60-year head start in living in this fragmented, plural way."
Ridiculous Copycats is on till 20 September, 11am-7pm (Sundays closed), at Art Musings, Colaba Cross Lane, Mumbai. The works are priced at ₹ 2-12 lakh.