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The landscape, the skin and its relation to the colour red forms the core of artist Puneet Kaushik’s solo exhibition Barren Red at Gallery Espace, New Delhi.
Delhi based artist Puneet Kaushik, with a uniquely “Global-Local” perspective, best known for his abstract and primeval artworks, has engaged and worked closely with tribal crafts practitioners for almost two decades now. He strongly feels that the national identity of India is rooted in its indigenous people, and their expressions. These manifest in building materials, crafts, textiles, folk stories etc. For him the nature of folk art is specific to its particular culture, which moves towards civilization yet, rapidly diminishing with modernity, industrialization, and outside influence. A suite of works comprising of installations and wall works under the title “Barren Red” by Kaushik will be on view until 4 January 2017 at Gallery Espace New Delhi.
“Art is the evidence of excavation of the self inflicted, choices representing the collective memories of landscape, people, culture and spaces. It is a visual manifestation of a historical past relevant in the present. My works impact more than just your physical space …Scribbling in a meandering free flow of territorial thoughts that layer of the social and cultural fabric of everyday existence almost in a meditative trance and yet entangled, knotted, tied, woven, stitched to let go of the wandering heart”, says Kaushik who has been engaged with indigenous art practices for over two decades now. Over the years these art forms have taken different directions and dimensions in his art practice. Techniques like crochet in steel, fibre art and bead work from Tibet constitute a major part of the artist’s vocabulary.
With Barren Red, the artist attempts to (re)establish techniques on the verge of extinction which include weaving, knitting, crochet and Tibetan bead work embellishment. “Fibre art” gets altogether a new dimension with crochet being knitted in copper and stainless steel wire. Such techniques not only transport us back to our roots but also evoke an urge of knowing the “self”. What remains in common is the colour “red”, which is universally identified. “Red” is the colour of the blood that flows within every human body. And is been a colour with different connotations but followed uniformly through the ages. The territorial landscape which is ever changing when viewed from the top (aerial view) also appears “red”; it can be one’s perception and can be related to the fierce world of terrorism we live in. The other aspect that the artist explores is of the “skin” which contains biological and cultural history within its layers — in a way, similar to the pigments of paint in an artwork, fibres in clothes, or the architectural makeup of a building.
Puneet in his installations successfully has been driven by a single idea or concept, injecting, an element of exploration, with materials…offering their own guiding agency; and in this respect he marks a posture of difference.
Barren Red showcases a tech of weaves of Kaushik’s multilayered installations and mixed-media works aimed at seeding the landscape to the scape we live in along with the viewer’s own interpretation. A thought about humanitarianism, the comprehensive colour “red” and a thought about our deep rooted traditions.
It will be very apt to quote the artist here “I am a montage of cross disciplines; that each space negotiates and creates a vocabulary of its own. Contrast is the core of the experience — light and dark, hard and soft, strong and fragile, robust and delicate, fiery and cool, passion and calm, intricate yet simple… Like the testament of our faith should be the power of cultural expressions to become the fine balance between silence and speech, gravity and lightness absence and presence, participation and witnessing.
In my domain you think, feel, love and are loved”.