PEEL

“What would happen if one woman told the truth about herself? The world would split open.” ~ Muriel Rukeyser

This is the first layer peeled…

The creatures peopling the oneiric picturescapes of Peel may be seen as the imagistic diary entries of the artist’s mind. The jumble of fears, realisations, and insights that form the amorphous complex of her consciousness collectively seep into the pen to reappear as a medley of caricaturistic, cartoonish creatures, rendered in a detailed, hyper-illustrative style. An early childhood spent in the close proximity of domestic animals nurtured a fondness for animal forms that have haunted her paintings for some time now. Minam has always shown a propensity to construct forms, however, that are neither demonstrative nor representationally static. Her visual aesthetic which is distinctly urban and modern, draws from a diverse range of interests (however casual, in some cases) whether comic book illustrations, pop art (poster design, album covers), fashion and product/toys design, Japanese printmaking, cinema, music, and video. A predominant use of the colour red, the large areas of positive and negative space, hard, curving lines, rich ornamentation, and disregard of conventional perspective and proportion (look at An Enormous Little Lamb) remind you of Aubrey Beardsley, himself influenced by Pre-Raphaelite painters and Japanese printmaking. However, the works themselves display a combination of various styles of drawing throughout the series thus defying simple categorization in terms of genres. These hybrid, surreal, fantastical creatures reminiscent of the beasts found in traditional Buddhist paintings (her training in traditional Thangka painting any influence?) and comic book science fiction, appear at times to emerge out of their surroundings, at times merging into it, and at times even morphing out of each other: what looks like an eye floating in a pool of grey identifies a face in the shadows, little flecks of lines make a man of a drip of red, in another case. A sense of strangeness and anxiety permeates the work, often palpable in the tension between the figures. Always flagrantly flamboyant, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes menacing, they speak at times, of flight and freedom and at others, of paralyses, persecution, and fear. Constantly evolving and “free-wheeling in an eternal state of flux” these creatures seem to have given themselves up to an ethos where “method is elusive.”

The hybrid nature of the creatures in Peel, that are at once universal archetypes and disguised self-portraits, represent anthropomorphized attributes of the larger human condition. Cat-like creatures, for instance with large alien-looking heads and fragile wrinkled bodies seem to be simultaneously confrontational and vulnerable. Epic mythological creatures, kings with spray cans, winged sphinx-like creatures with exploding breasts speak of larger, grandiloquent tales, while always in the peripheries are the smaller worlds that seem to exist on their own. All of this comes together in a medley of voices that intersect and play with each other. “I like to look at the paintings as if I were watching two people in a conversation…the emphasis, the pauses, the rebuttal, the drama that’s what I find most engaging,” when the energy is so palpable that the specifics of the conversations do not matter. Just as the images represent conversations the artist is having with herself, the creatures are similarly speaking with each other in several tongues, pulling the viewer into their multi-dialogues. These landscapes trace re-drawn mythologies that draw from her many contexts, born perhaps from her rejection of any one defined, inherited, traditional value-system.

Born in 1980, in Naharlagun, Arunachal Pradesh, Minam Apang spent her early years in Itanagar, and has schooled in Mussourie, Chicago, and Leeds. After spending a year doing odd jobs in New York City she came to Bombay to study at the J. J. school of Arts and has been living and working here since. Growing up away from home, for the most part, “in third cultures, removed from family, oscillating between multiples worlds,” gave her the early experience of being slightly removed from the contexts she occupied. The inevitable feelings of rootlessness and vulnerability, born of this feeling of chronic alienation, fostered an acute sensitivity towards her environment and led her to be introverted and introspective. To understand her relation to painting is to understand the affirmative human desire to express oneself, making the process of painting an existential endeavour.

Peel emerged from the simple desire to make a fresh start, and to keep it simple this time. While she has in the past worked largely with acrylics on canvas, occasionally also foraying into sculptural works made with found materials, this time she chose to work on paper with water-based photo/fountain pen ink. Choosing the medium for its simplicity, what began as playful ‘studies’, soon grew into a consolidated body of work. Soon after her first few exercises, she came to realise the beauty of working with ink: it offered her the spontaneity, fluidity, and recklessness she sought. While working with acrylic/graphic design, for instance, her style tended to be very stark and relied on high-contrasts (reminiscent of pop and poster art). She says she often sought to “counter the opacity inherent to the medium with textured impasto and sculptural vigour,” but ink she found, “had a presence that was at once delicate and unforgiving.” It is not the kind of medium one can wrestle with, as one might with clay or textured paints, it almost forces you to “surrender to the medium.” 

The first stage in her process involved staining the papers with accidental blots and allowing other aleatory stains (like inks from another work seeping onto a fresh sheet of paper, footprints, or the stain left behind by a swatted mosquito) to function “as the basis to suggest a composition and as a means of stimulating the imagination”. These early stages have been decidedly liberating and cathartic: the act of pouring the inks to stain the paper was unrestrictive, and allowed her to lose herself to the movement of the action. After the inks were strewn across the paper, they were allowed to play with each other: by folding the paper, wet with ink, to get mirrored blots, or throwing water, whisky, coffee, or coke (whatever was close at hand in her immediate environment) on the surface to facilitate mixing, she prepared the ground for a chaos of smudges and colour that would then be organised and engendered.

After the inks have dried, she says “the pen takes over, playing the role of an editor of sorts, shaping out images and forms from the marks and stains”. The initial stages of image-formation traced out the forms and images that come to mind in an immediate response to a given environmental stimulus or stain on the paper. However, the forms that emerged may be seen as expressions of the artist’s emotional and intellectual processes without censorship. Sprawled across her paper on the floor she spontaneously, ‘interprets’ the abstract blurs of these quasi-Rorschachian ink blots “into imagery that comes directly from a pen that seems to move of its own volition on the textured ground.” The forms are constructed in a manner that may be loosely compared to the exercise of free association. Peel also emerged from the need to move away from a deliberate, pre-planned, conceptual approach to image-making for a more formal one that “engages with the material in a process that is more visceral and pure” resulting in works that display a controlled balance between moments of spontaneous overflow and premeditated action.

These narratives, that have emerged from the inner recesses and the specular surfaces of the artist’s mind, are neither linear nor structured, the plots are fragmented, and beginnings, middles, and ends run amok. The works essentially attempt to describe, in their own idiosyncratic manner, the artist’s zeitgeist, without specific, incidental details. These works come from a need to “journey back into the interior life and self, when I feel I have lost track.” While self-confrontation is integral to her creative process, Minam consciously tries to steer clear of imagery that is overly self-referential. “I want to delve deeper into the inner life: draw from my psycho-emotional processes, without coming up with works that become too self-indulgent and esoteric. After all art, is about communication and about another person recognizing him/herself in a work…of relating to a story, to a history, and so to another individual. Only Art that communicates is truly alive.” 

Nivedita Magar