Ellipsis, the monumental 60-foot-long canvas that is the latest work by Jitish Kallat, is exhibited for the first time this month at the only space big enough to take it, the vast Famous Studios in Mumbai. The artwork began as canvases covered in grids meticulously hand-drawn in watercolour pencil. The introduction of water into this grid disrupted its stability, triggering gestures and forms that, in turn, led to others, opening up the canvas to force fields beyond a single artist-creator. The play of water is significant to the way the surfaces evolved. As Kallat puts it, all painting is really a story of repeated hydration and dehydration. It is the effect of water that allows the paint to move on the surface. Once on canvas, gravity acts on its liquescence, pulling it in various directions, cleaving the grid. The rate of dehydration preordained the texture the surfaces took on, creating cracks resembling parched earth in patches that dried swiftly. In this manner the surface of the painting, opened up to the elements, became a microcosm of the earth itself, imbued with the entropy of the universe surrounding it.
Early Years
Having burst onto the scene straight out of art school with a solo exhibition in 1997 at Mumbai’s Chemould Gallery, Jitish Kallat made his name as a painter, creating on his canvases, dense, hallucinatory surfaces packed with imagery that explored selfhood, mortality, and the passage of time against the backdrop of Mumbai’s teeming urban decay. Since then, he has explored diverse media, working with sculpture, drawing, photography, installations and videos. In 2014, Kallat expanded his practice outside the studio by curating the 2014 edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale titled ‘Whorled Explorations’; an enquiry across one hundred art works scattered across a historic port city, of the artist’s enduring interest in conflations of the cosmic and the everyday. In this journey, painting had taken a backseat. In fact, Kallat had completely stopped painting for about five years—until his 2017 mid-career retrospective at the NGMA in Delhi, which brought together many of his early painted works across various collections, and sparked a desire to work with canvas again. Thus began a slow and tentative return to painting, which in 2019, culminated in his largest work on canvas to date (60 feet at last count, made up of 5×9-foot panels), a still-evolving work titled Ellipsis. Together with the installation Covering Letter (terranum nuncius), it forms the artist’s latest solo exhibition.
A New Launch
The artist who painted Ellipsis (as well as a related suite of paintings exhibited recently at the exhibition ‘Phase Transition’ in Paris: Galerie Templon, January 12-March 9, 2019) is a distinctly different person from the one who painted his early career canvases. If the earlier works saw him meticulously create preconceived imagery on canvas, Ellipsis evolved (and continues to evolve) through encounters where the artist is a third party, who lets the interaction of various elemental forces—air, water, gravity—as well as the canvas itself guide his gestures.
The Making Of Ellipsis
Different segments of Ellipsis were painted separately over the course of many months and assembled together later. Sometimes, entirely new bridge forms emerged between two distinct frames as they were placed next to each other, while others were trimmed and discarded. This method of creation, akin to a one-man-plus-the-universe version of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse (in which a drawing or literary work was collectively assembled by passing a piece of paper between members of a group, with the contributions of each hidden from others by folding the paper, only to be revealed as a whole at the end of the game), was first used by Jitish in 2017, in a series of accordion-book-like folded drawings titled Tetralemma that were part of the exhibition ‘Covariance’ held in Brussels. Ellipsis too reads like an accordion book. Visibly split by joints, the painting can be rearranged at will to occupy different spaces. Its imagery, ambiguous yet perceivable as celestial diagrams, cosmological maps, mathematical graphs, geographical markings, topographical representations, botanical and microbial drawings and DNA diagrams, reminds one of the notebooks or blackboard ruminations of a renaissance man. The stream of disparate associations refuses a holistic reading, arresting the viewer in a state of ambivalence bordering on anxiety.
Covering Letter (terranum nuncius) is among works by Kallat that read historic records back to the present, holding them up as mirrors against which to evaluate a changed world. The first Covering Letter, created in 2012, was a moving fog screen projection of the letter that Gandhi wrote to Hitler in 1939, appealing for peace a few weeks before Germany invaded Poland and set off the Second World War. Covering Letter (terranum nuncius) will also be a part of Kallat’s upcoming solo exhibition at the Frist Museum of Art, Nashville, in March 2020. It is assembled out of sounds and images representing the earth and humanity from the Voyager Golden Records which were sent into space by NASA in 1977 aboard Voyager space crafts 1 and 2. At Famous Studios, Covering Letter (terranum nuncius) is exhibited facing Ellipsis.
A Unique Experience
As viewers enter the installation space, they are greeted by a friendly cacophony of greetings in 55 world languages that were among the sounds that the Golden Records carried into space. Images from the Voyager discs are also part of the installation. They include affective vignettes of human life, scientific and cosmological diagrams, representations of human anatomy and genetic makeup, animals, iconic architecture, and so on, often annotated with measurements; the cosmological and scientific diagrams here provide the viewer with entry points into the sea of references from which the artist drew the imagery used in Ellipsis. With these, the artist returns the message to a far more misanthropic world, as if to ask, “do we even recognise this version of ourselves anymore?”
Ellipisis will show at Mumbai’s Famous Studios from 10-21 January, 2020.
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