Lot 36

 

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As a child, Ganesh Pyne spent hours listening to his grandmother’s fantastical-and often macabre-tales woven from mythology and folklore in the crumbling mansion where he lived with his extended family in Calcutta’s Kaviraj Row. Across the street, his attention was drawn to the wooden statues of Vaishnavite saint Chaitanya and his disciple half concealed by shadows in its sanctum. He was equally captivated by the jatra or folk theatre... As a child, Ganesh Pyne spent hours listening to his grandmother’s fantastical-and often macabre-tales woven from mythology and folklore in the crumbling mansion where he lived with his extended family in Calcutta’s Kaviraj Row. Across the street, his attention was drawn to the wooden statues of Vaishnavite saint Chaitanya and his disciple half concealed by shadows in its sanctum. He was equally captivated by the jatra or folk theatre performances that his neighbour Madan Pyne regularly hosted. The mysterious and melancholic imagery of his art emerges from these early memories, further informed by the traumatic realities he lived through, including communal violence during Partition, political instability during the Naxal insurgency of the 1960s and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, and the profound grief of losing his beloved father and elder brother.

Pyne developed a personal symbolism and built allegorical worlds populated by toys, masks, wounded gladiators, wandering saints, hybrid creatures, weapons, and skeletal forms. In the present lot, a robot-like figure stands stiffly against a shadowy, indistinct backdrop, gazing at a tree stump. As in many of his compositions, a pervasive sense of loneliness and alienation lingers. Possibly influenced by his years spent making illustrations for Mandar Mallick’s animation studio in the early 1960s, the figure occupies what Ranjit Hoskote describes as “the treacherous space between toy and presence... All of Pyne’s toys are alive… Standing as they do on thresholds of transition, his figures are both X and not-X; they possess a disquieting quality of betweenness” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Reflections on the Art of Ganesh Pyne”, Ganesh Pyne: A Pilgrim in the Dominion of Shadows, Mumbai: Galerie 88, 2005, p. 15). The tree stump, though less overt than the skeletal forms that often appear in his paintings, serves as a subtle evocation of death and decay. It may also suggest a more contemporary anxiety, an elegy for the encroachment of technology and urban life upon the natural world.

Such works are open to numerous interpretations and possess a “...self-assurance and yet also the tantalising quality of code. The viewer must read and re-read it as he goes along, guessing at meanings, putting the discrete parts of the puzzle together. Yet this is never mechanical activity: to participate in the experience of a Pyne painting is to complete its significance in one’s mind, where it explodes like a conceptual mine that has been activated by contact.” (Hoskote, p. 16).

The liminal world that Pyne creates appears to be lit from within, an effect achieved through the tempera technique he adopted from the 1960s onwards. Guided by Nandalal Bose’s writings in Shilpa Chorcha, he experimented with various binders, before settling on gum acacia which gave the pigments a distinctive glow. He carefully built up areas of light and shadow by layering translucent glazes, till the required colour saturation and sense of volume and depth were achieved. Pyne’s masterful and nuanced handling of light and shadow was deeply influenced by the lyrical compositions of Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore as well as Rembrandt’s chiaroscuros. As Hoskote remarks, “Pyne is, above all, a creator of atmospheres. His art remains motivated, despite periodic adjustments of style, palette and detail, by the quest for the expansion of consciousness: his paintings articulate his belief in the possibility of retrieving the enchantment of experience. Pyne more than thinks, he believes that the known can be amplified by contact with the unknown, that the alchemies of image-making can help transmute the base metal of being-in-the-world into the gold of refined perception.” (Hoskote, p. 10)

“In my mind’s eye, I see things in my own way. I carry my own world within me.” - GANESH PYNE

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