Jyothi Basu

Visionary Antiquities, Nature Morte (with Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke), New Delhi, November 18 - December 9, 2006

Good overall condition. Colors of original slightly brighter than catalogue illustration.
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Mumbai-based artist Jyothi Basu's The Chosen One, is a sliver of the inspired worlds that the artist is committed to defining by way of his painterly practice.

Peter Nagy, artist, curator and the director of Nature Morte Gallery in New Delhi writes, 'Jyothi Basu's other-worldly landscapes are built of architectonic ciphers that mimic the forms of both nature (plants, animals, spores) and culture (writing, figuration, decoration). The things that most closely resemble buildings accommodate multiple pedigrees: Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and Christian. His planet is composed of a linguistic superstructure (signs, symbols, letters and icons) that pulses with meaning and life.'

Basu is an inveterate collector. He gleans occurrences and non-occurrences that crowd his vision and the distant reaches of his peripheral vision. However, Basu does not permit them to translate into a dry monosyllabic realism. He instead allows his landscapes to be startled by the cogitative energies of his creativity.  These landscapes whisper about the quest for a cradle where antiquities and futures will dwell together and energise all those who step into their ambit. They are so precision-driven that they give us the impression that the artist hopes to employ them as templates for land art projects he may undertake in the future. 

Into these landscapes he inserts totem poles overrun by intricately cryptic symbologies and openly vulnerable scabs of bark. More often than not we find that the poles uphold the structural involutions of this proposed place. In The Chosen One we witness a solitary pole. Its surroundings embrace only the most basic inflections of earth. Stripped of the landscape around it, the pole turns into an organic being that unbelongs to any particular landscape. It appears, instead, to essay the part of the root of a pillar, which in turn flourishes in the openness above. In this work Basu contours, with the dryness of pastel, a streak of colour that is mesmerisingly iridescent. The streak could without any strain be read as a flash of lightning wrapped around the pole. Its presence is fraught with a sense of foreboding that is not ordinarily found in Basu's body of work and could be suggestive of distant and nebulous fears. (Gitanjali Dang, Mumbai, July 2007).

Gitanjali Dang is an art critic with The Hindustan Times, Mumbai.