“My main weapon is humor. It overthrows the romantic mode of consumption that we would otherwise be happy with. Are we to laugh at my images? Or should we just enjoy them voyeuristically? I’d like to question the stereotypes we live with.”
(Farhad Hussain)

At first glance Farhad Hussain’s current collection of canvases seem made for easy visual consumption: they are big, brightly coloured and full of merry members of happy families. So what’s Hussain giving us, you think, that others (not to name names) with their flatly depicted scenes of domestic bliss aren’t?

And then, you notice that Hussain’s painted smiles and somersaulting children are more freaky than friendly and that the cheerful, grinning members of would-be families look more like they belong in a circus troop than in a living room.

Meet the violently pink pet, with the face of a slightly devious drag artist, or a ‘father-figure’ with an fuchsia turban, whose knowing leer is anything but paternal and who might not make such a wholesome candidate for a Sunday-afternoon visit after all (however well-matched his head-gear is with the pink flower-patterned artefacts in the sitting room).

Luckily for us, if Hussain’s work quotes – directly or just by visual analogy – from those of other artists who operate within similar iconographic parameters, the effect is more spoof than tribute.

Hussain’s most obvious artistic reference point is Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan; at which he studied from 1998 to 2003. His early works (with their rounded Kalighat Patua-inspired figuration) were virtually indistinguishable from others coming out of this tradition and traces of the Santiniketan masters, lingers on in these newer pictures too – though, happily for us, in a welcome whimsical vein.

In the theatrical entwining of the sinister and safe, the suggestion of a crossing of fantasy and reality that frolics throughout Hussain’s new paintings, we see elements of K.G. Subramanyan. Wild and tame, what is interior and what exterior become as deliberately blurred as in many of Subramanyan’s reverse-side paintings on glass of household scenes: the yellow cat that appears as a cavorting lion outside a window in one of Hussain’s depictions, is uncannily similar (and ironically, less life-size in scale) to the vast, still ornament sitting on a bookshelf in another canvas.

But Hussain’s images are more overtly sexual and definitely more mischievous than many of his Santiniketan brethren, as they bring into the drawing room a cast of cunning-looking characters who would look more at home on a street corner. Like the child in the florescent pram who looks just a fraction too lecherous to be believable in the guise of ‘baby of the house’. Or, the blissful squirrel nibbling something next to an embarrassingly phallic-looking banana.

This salacious slant, Hussain attributes to his time spent studying in Baroda at the M.S. University from 2003 to 2005. He says: “After coming to Baroda my works took a different turn. Their atmosphere is ambiguous and the characters, especially the women, are meant to be shocking.”

Hussain’s pictures from 2000 to 2003 use Calcutta-culled image-making for unexpected purposes: bloated, pink forms contort themselves into lewd –  and ludicrous – poses. A spin off on the sexual acrobatics of Jogen Chowdhury’s distended, cross-hatched figures, Hussain’s portrayals of mating rituals are many shades more bizarre: in one a massive, pink woman with breasts that look like evil little daggers seems to be yelling profanities at viewers, in another a beefy, chocolate-coloured damsel plays with herself, while a tiny woman clinging onto her is strangled by a disembodied arm.

If in the current series, Hussain has toned up his palate to include lots of pink and yellow and electric blue, he has – for this show – toned down his use of overtly sexual allusions: the characters are more recognizable for their everyday presence in our lives. These Mothers, Fathers and children with their two-by-two houses, neat windows, neater picture-frames and heavily-patterned table ornaments seem to lift out of a reality accessible to everyone: which is, perhaps, darker for that very familiarity.

These images wreak havoc on supposedly picture-perfect moments – a family standing around a birthday cake (does a cake that colour appear more poisonous than edible?), school kids posing with their arms around each other for an invisible camera (which one is male, which female?) and even a self-portrait of a newly-wed Hussain hugging his beaming wife, Jasmine (the gender-bending continues).

So Hussain’s new images mess around with the boundary lines of male and female, fact and fiction, the alluring and the repellent – not to mention with value systems that we might espouse but seem rather trite (and maybe a little menacing) in the harsh glare of the florescent lights that seem to illuminate Hussain’s virulently hued scenes. Because, Hussain’s canvases take the enactments of middle-class, home-and-hearth cosiness for granted; while simultaneously sprinkling them with a touch of the unpredictable; they make us doubt that conventional codes of conduct are such straightforward blessings in the first place.

Zehra Jumabhoy