Colours Come Alive

I’m at the Shridharani Art Gallery at the Triveni Kala Sangam, tucked away on a street between the busy Mandi House roundabout and popular eating destination Bengali Market. The building is deserted and I feel like I have wandered in by accident. The vibes that the empty halls give me is not of hostility – I don’t feel like a wanderer – rather I feel as if the walls themselves are surprised to see me, a visitor. Perhaps the sense of loneliness I experience are because of the late hour, relatively speaking of course. It’s 7 pm, it is a typical dark, slightly misty November evening and all self-respecting karmcharis have left for the night. Being just before closing time, only the guards remain, and they are huddled up in their sweaters, shawls and other warm clothing.

At the end of the dimly lit corridors is a hall brightly lit. Curious, I investigate, and as soon as I open the glass doors, I am hit by a myriad of colours that seems to surround, envelop me, but rather than suffocate, these colours heighten my senses – the walls are covered with paintings, and looking at them, I feel awestruck.

A small, polite man with a scraggly beard approaches me. He was sitting in a corner and I had not even noticed him as I entered. Hastily, I change my expression (I admit, I must have looked quite the fool, standing like that with my jaw hanging open). He introduces himself as the artist, Madan Lal, who has painted each one of the paintings. Currently settled in Chandigarh, his quiet demeanour in no way betrays the fact that he is an internationally renowned painter, having successfully held exhibitions in some of the most fabulous art centres including Stockholm, Berlin and London. 

Madan Lal’s exhibition, Urban Mirage, explores the increasingly busy but ultimately hollow modern urban existence that plagues humanity. “The problem with us humans is that our yearning for possessions just increases – materialism has never decreases. That is what my paintings explore.” Among themes, he explores through his painting the reluctance of procreation in modern married urban citizens in ‘Aquarium’; the five phases of life, from birth to death in ‘Where Seeds To Grow’ and true emotion of a person in a crowd of masks in ‘Faces’. ‘Faces’ in particular stands out for me – as an English literature student, I am eerily reminded of Mohan Rakesh’s play Halfway House or Aadhe Adhure.

“I chose the word ‘mirage’ because that is mrig trishna, a desire that can never be fulfilled. Our current existence has left us like the egret – always flying high up in the sky whether it is day or night, and crying out for satisfaction, but we never come down to land, which is what we were meant to do,”  Lal says.

For him, painting is a never-ending journey. “I have no focal point in my paintings, rather my creations showcase what I feel are the complexities of human relationships and life.” His paintings are awash with symbolism – almost every painting has arrows pointing in every direction, which depict the inner and outer chaos that plagues the urban human life. Other symbols that are present in his works are that of the parrot – for him, representing love, since according to mythology, the parrot is the vehicle of the god Kamdev. “I like to communicate to my audience through symbols; all that is needed is a close look and all that I wish to communicate will come through,” he says.

Sufism is well and alive in his works. “I hail from Punjab, and Sufism is seeped into our literature, our very culture,” Lal explains. “Sufism is not limited to any religion; it is a way of life. Right from childhood, it is inculcated into every sort of our creative outcomes.” 

As a sleepy night watchman comes to usher us out, we talk about the merits and demerits of different art styles (I’ll confess, I just knew the terms Cubism, Fauvism and a couple of others, like Neo-Dadism, which I guessed the names of). Walking out, I am still thinking about what all Madan Lal has just told me. An evening just got transformed for me from a dull one to an intellectually enriching one.

And yet again I marvel at the different shades of this city – from being asked by an exasperating rich-boy-wearing-shades-at-night if I know who his father is (which actually happened to me earlier in the day because I prevented him from cutting the line at the metro station, true story!), to being bowled over by acrylic-on-canvas.

---Kartikeya