February is art month

Icons

Meanwhile it has been a busy month at Kalakendra Gallery. It began with Julietta’s ceramic ICONS exhibition with its witty and whimsical representations of the famous. Julietta does not seek formal perfection because, as she puts it, “blurriness and cracks are part of the game, as in life”. She also created a multimedia art installation inspired by Tim Burton’s animated movie The Corpse Bride. 

In Bloom

The exhibition space was shared with another ceramic potter, Puneet Brar, whose works were entitled In Bloom. Though inspired by real flowers they are based on fantasy. “I have created a garden,” she writes. “It is a tribute to the power of Mother Earth  to flower in the most adverse conditions, to the people because of whom my life has flowered.

Sculpted Wax Candles

Later in the month, Kalakendra hosted exhibitions by two Auroville units, Maroma and Auroville Papers. Sculpted Wax Candles displayed the inventiveness February was a busy month for artists and culture-vultures alike, with many exhibitions to choose from.

Transparence

Jyoti and Nathalie’s exhibition Transparence at Savitri Bhavan aimed to transport the viewer through time, light and transparencies. The artists were entrusted with fabric that had been used by The Mother, as impetus to create their artworks. The resulting collages emphasise the quality of Beauty – a quality the Mother esteemed. Nathalie’s artworks integrate Mother’s lace with handmade paper that Nathalie created in collaboration with Auroville Papers. She stresses that the works should not be seen as religious relics, but as works that “tell a simple story of love” for The Mother. Many of Jyoti’s highly colourful and densely-layered collages depict the natural world and its flora and fauna. The rich layering of fabric and other media draws the viewer deeply into a specific and lush rendition of nature, evoked through elegant and detailed composition.  The two artists claim that the exhibition’s themes of time, light and transparencies capture the journey of pioneers – whose hearts were “wide open for the light to travel through”. 

Bangla Time Travel

Birgitta’s exhibition Bangla Time Travel at European House built on her long-standing oeuvre of magical bark prints, but with a new twist. Her latest prints were made during her 2019 residency at Dubolhati Palace in Bangladesh, and utilised the ruined Palace’s highly-textured plaster walls. Birgitta takes the prints of these surfaces – tree bark, ruined walls – and then uses shading to uncover beings and faces in the shapes, to bring them into the foreground. In this way, the surfaces present her with different stories that stem from the local culture. Birgitta perceives these surfaces to hold history and myths – a consciousness that can manifest through an artist’s hands. “The world beyond our visible world turns out to be the biggest adventure of my life,” says Birgitta.

Maroma founder, Paul Pinthon, in creating extraordinary art forms out of wax. They included representations of abstract paintings, flowers and machine-like images (with bolts inserted into the wax). But as he stressed in his introduction, “these candles are still intended to be burned, to bring light”.

Auroville Papers

Downstairs, Auroville Papers invited us to see their artistic works in progress, including not only their famous flowers and tall amphoras, but also new departures, like abstracts made of waste indigo cloth and papier maché bowls moulded from rocks and networks. Their sources of inspiration remain, as ever, very organic, “which is exactly how our unit has developed,” explains Louisa, one of the team. In their playfulness, imaginativeness and original use of materials both these exhibitions exhibited something that, as one visitor put it, “is truly Aurovilian’.  

Notes on the Way

Art as spiritual exploration was perhaps best exemplified by two other events. In the Centre d’Art, Citadines, Pierre Legrand displayed his Notes on the Way, a retrospective of some of his work of the past years. His experiments with exploring and evoking a different form of consciousness through new forms and colour juxtapositions are remarkable testaments to his single-minded pursuit, through many years, of the underlying structure and dance of a new world. As he put it some years, ago, “My workshop sometimes feels like a place of alchemy”. 

Alchemy

‘Alchemy’ could also describe the fifteen Savitri paintings of Mayaura which she presented on two days in February, for they seek, through a striking semi-abstract language, to communicate and evoke the subtle resonances of passages from Canto One, Book One of Savitri. “It’s like everything I have done in my life enabled me to start doing this work,” Mayaura says. “Savitri is an initiation and now it is guiding my whole life.”

The intention is to make a boxed set of reproductions of the paintings as well as to exhibit them in a Paris gallery. “I feel it is important that Sri Aurobindo and Savitri are discovered by a French public, and the paintings are just a tool, a channel, for doing this.”