PISURWO
SOLO exhibition
Jehangir art gallery
1st jan to 7th Jan 2019
ANAMIKA अनामिका
The name Anamika (female) comes from the Sanskrit word which means, "nameless." Sanskrit word which means, "person without name ring finger (finger between middle finger and little finger) is called anamika in sanskrit." Sanskrit word which means, "a beautiful lady having no name.." Hindi word which means, "nameless or without description."
Also suggested is name an Indian word which means, "the ring finger." Hindi word which means, "ring finger." Sanskrit word which means, "The Powerful Ring Finger,The nameless finger. Many cultures avoided the true name of a powerful entity, and called it indirectly or called it nameless.."
Pisurwo Jitendra Suralkar is a character. A character that is defined by a stubborn triumph in art. He incarnates practices not as inspiration or technical sycophancy but rather as ideological exercises in conversation with the artists Hussain & Picasso. Art History and its tango with Indian contemporary artists suffers a bias of duality. One that arises from its own lethargy to remain accessible from its occidental perch , serious attempts to include history of art from India began in the last decade of the 20th century and has being ongoing in the 21st century once India's promised the world the possibility of it being an economic power house. Syllabuses at art schools in India have a disdain to catching up and thus artists disregard art history as an engagement not worthy of vocation fearing its inaccessibility. Translations are extremely rare and thus many pedagogical exercises in state funded redundant. Pisurwo does not come from the Sir JJ School of Art, he studied on the plateau above the Ajanta Caves at the Khiroda College of Arts, Gulzar Gawali , surrealist painter was his teacher. Shifting to Bombay in the year 2000 as a painter he pursued his practice beginning with the pavement art gallery at Kala Ghoda to mystical meetings with MF Hussain. A practice that is marked by his mastery of stroke and an intelligence with colour. At the Gufa Gallery Pisurwo confronts the artist to whom he is compared but not the one he sees himself ape, rather he affirms an incarnation in attitude , ideology and stroke. Pisurwo is a living legend and among the subaltern rebels to art history and the ways of its gathering.
Sumesh Sharma
Bombay, 2018
TO LIVE TO PAINT TO LIVE
Looking at Pisurwo’s work, the first thing we notice is the omnipresence of the human face. The more naturalistic works and the portraits, practiced by the artist since the beginning of his career until now - and probably forever - give us the entering point in his world.
His way of engaging with the portrait, which could be wrongfully read as a classical attitude, is very much influenced by the years passed as a street portraitist, by all the constraints and the context of the job: the drawing has to be fast, the result must be resembling and satisfying for the subject/buyer. There is no study of the psychology of the character, no gaze through his mind and soul, just his blank appearance - just Pisurwo’s swift and secure lines. Nothing but pure drawing. And when this manner is freed by those constrains, it becomes the medium for the real content of his portraits and naturalistic sketches: his relationship with the characters. His wife, his children, his family, the professors that helped him, the painters that inspired him, everyone is there in a familiar and intimate universe held by Pisurwo’s care and will to honour them. His numerous sketchbooks are filled to the brim with drawings, faces, bodies, and always his signature, that he marks on the paper as a real creative act, along with the date and, strangely enough, the time at which the sketch was taken. This seemingly irrelevant detail demonstrates that for Pisurwo drawing is more then the simple registration of world around him, it is the immediate translation of that world, the almost instantaneous transcription of forms. Simply put, sketching has become one with the act of seeing, his own way of perceiving reality.
In his studio near the Ajanta caves, portraits are not the only Pisurwo’s occupation. Next to this mystical site, Pisurwo seems to be visited be all sorts of images, or even, of spirits. Yakshinis and yakshas, kings and queens and mythological figures invade his canvases in a dreamlike state that echoes cubist aesthetics and M.F.Hussein work. An immense cosmogony unravels before us as we witness the spirits suffer, rejoice, engage in dialogue or in sexual acts; we see them merge and overcome duality. As an obsessively repeated facial pattern, they saturate the page or the canvas, leaving nothing except their presence for us to see. From the smallest drawing to the largest canvas, this horror vacui could come from his relation and incessant observation of the Ajanta cave paintings themselves, evolved and transformed through Pisurwo’s sensibility. This overflowing of signs, lines, marks and gestures is profoundly characteristic of his work. Plates, family photos, house walls, insignificant objects, leafs, stones and even a dead cockroach, nothing is spared, everything is a suitable support for his magmatic creativity: an all-over that could cover hills, mountains, us all and the entire world.
A personal quest for meaning that, by engulfing everything around him, engages us in a journey beyond reality itself.
Painting as breathing,
drawing as living,
art as a way of being.
- Text by Niccolò Moscatelli (Paris France)
PISURWO
SOLO exhibition
Jehangir art gallery
1st jan to 7th Jan 2019
ANAMIKA अनामिका
