Lalu Prasad Shaw’s temperas are a revelation, 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 here- ‘The Stories We Tell Ourselves’ at Art Exposure (Jan 11- Feb 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, but it is also an oversimplification. 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, and far from excluding content, 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. It is associated with living, living more ascertaining to life unto the point of an act. In these entire 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.
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. It is associated with living, living more ascertaining to life unto the point of an act. In these entire 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 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 reassembly 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 logic of the subconscious, that our psychic symptoms have causes, origins even that the dreams do not cheat with metaphor, and so it pays to be meticulous and rigorous.
