Delhi Art Fair 2015 ~

I will forever remember F N D'Souza's blue. All the fabulous contemporary outre art all around, and here I'm remembering only the blue of a 70s painting. It was unlike any I had seen. I remember every little detail of the still life, but that blue, well it's burnt into my memory. It was a rich, deep color, full of the most radiant and dark and deep character. I had stepped in front of the canvas, and I'd  thought I could spend all of my time of the whole of the day, just gazing at that color. That's how magical it was. 

Strange things one carries back.

Genres, styles, periods, countries: the riches on display were staggering. For me, each piece was like a story aching to jump out and be told. Sewing machines as still heads, the gulf between two mirror images of the same person, the playfulness on a canvas of an artist unable to keep his exuberance to himself, the intimacy of the handwritten letter and it's demise in the hands of the digital, the jumble of nonsense-shapes reflecting an airplane in flight when light fell on the installation, portraits of pain, faces which gazed as if into the soul of the onlooker, mythic figures revelling in modern times, women celebrating their sexuality and men discovering theirs. 

The beauty of art is the freedom it affords the viewer to see herself in each canvas. The story being told by the painter is seldom the story the viewer sees. Sometimes a deviant stroke, sometimes a killer color, sometimes an expression which burns through the canvas - and the tale one finds one's soul catching is the cumulative sum of the viewer's own life-story. Art is literature seen as cinema captured in a single frame. 

Sometimes I feel the craft of an artist is tougher, more exhausting than that of an auteur in any other art form. She has to compress all the exhaustion and exhilaration of life into one canvas with the literality of a paintbrush and the shade of a color. The most intimate stories require the most upfront representations. There's no place to hide.

As I stood in front of an incredible canvas of a moment caught in motion, but made hazy by memory, as if of an image seen through the mist of time,  I saw a young school kid in his uniform, with his backpack intact, staring at it with his mouth open. And I found,  I was also standing and staring at the painting with my mouth open. I recognized the innocence and wonder in the child. And I thought - well, there was still some hope left for me, in these cynical times. Art is such a journey of discovery - and rediscovery