Mohan Samant centenary show at KNMA & how trade exhibitions at Pragati Maidan left a mark on Amitava Das' art

Detail from 'We Have Already Gone Beyond Whatever We Have - Friedrich Nietzsche' (2011) by Amitava Das, on show at KNMA Saket till September 30, 2024.

Artist Amitava Das doesn't always know what an artwork will look like when it is done. But he always knows where to begin: with a dot. Many dots "make a line". Add more dots, and it becomes a mass. "But dot is the most essential part in visual art. So it is like a journey with the dots, with the masses, with the lines - it starts like this, but one never know where it leads to," Das says over the phone from his central Delhi studio.

Indeed, dots, lines, masses take shapes as varied as graphite heads, disembodied arms and legs, robotic figures, animals, birds, shapes that could be spaceships or astronauts, and aerial views of traipse artists in his works. Embeds of bus tickets and clothes tags in Japanese appear in the middle of these artworks as remnants of a different time and place but also anchors in a pre-sent moment. Quotes from Friedrich Nietzsche and Shakespeare fit into this assemblage, as yet another tool for making meaning. And the key to it all seems to be in the title of the show: 'If we knew the point', borrowed from Das's favourite poet, Argentinian Roberto Juarróz (1925-95).

Sample this excerpt from the poem, translated by Andrés Neuman for the 'FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry':

"If we knew the point

where something will always be something,

where the bone will not forget the flesh,

where the fountain is mother to another fountain,

where the past will never be past,

we could leave that point and erase all the others,

or at least keep it in a safer place."

The complete poem, at KNMA Saket

Das's works are a feat of layering, but also of editing and paring back. White ballpoint and correction pen share space in his arsenal with graphite, metallic marker, water colours, ink, gouache, collage, palm leaf paper on mount board, and of course found objects.

And if Nietzsche and Shakespeare offer an interest entry point into his works - some of which draw their titles from these thinkers and writers (example, 'Thoughts Are The Shadows of Our Feelings' - Friedrich Nietzsche [2011], and 'Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow' - William Shakespeare [2011]) - the found objects in his collages have an interesting story of their own.

'Thoughts Are The Shadows of Our Feelings' - Friedrich Nietzsche [2011], by Amitava Das.Das designed Trade Development Authority exhibitions at Pragati Maidan (now Bharat Mandapam) in Delhi between 1977 and 2001. (TDA was merged into the India Trade Promotion Organisation in 1992.)

Now, designing exhibitions for Indian and international visitors before economic liberalization in 1991 had its own challenges. In the 1970s and '80s, Das travelled abroad to research the latest and best in exhibition design. Foreign travel was not as common then as it is now. And in addition to exposure and experiences, the trips yielded bits and bobs - museum tickets, tags from new clothes, bills in foreign languages that Das was loath to discard. Something about these tidbits captured for Das the things he had seen and felt on these trips. Eventually, this paraphernalia started to find its way into his art.

Some of it is ensconced in artworks that are on show currently at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Saket, south Delhi. Case in point, a 2011 collage-gouache-opaque watercolour-correction pen-metallic paint-on-palm-leaf-on-mount work titled simply after a Friedrich Nietzsche quote: 'We Have Already Gone Beyond Whatever We Have'. Look closely, and you'll see a cutout of another Nietzsche quote - alongside tags for something bought at Muji in Japan for 504 yen!

'We Have Already Gone Beyond Whatever We Have'

Das explains why these old keepsakes are central to his works, where layering and contouring and collaging and lettering combine in a sort of free play till, by some alchemy, it all comes together for the artist. "You can say these (tickets, tags, etc.) are like travel logs without words, visual travel logs... I use all kinds of materials (in my art)... it looks very simple, but I use lots of materials, I combine them, I use found objects and I use - there is a great revolution in writing instruments nowadays... I even use the correction pen for those white dots and things like that. It is also like play: you play with the different (materials), these are like toys or the mediums or the paints for me are like toys. I combine them, I play with them and a revelation comes out when the work is finished."

These days, black is his "favourite colour", but Das is not averse to colour - reds, pinks, yellows, greens spill out of the frames at KNMA. Some works look like they would be at home in a dystopian contemporary web comic. Others look they came out of a Paris atelier known for its vibrant print making. Some look like a throwback to an older tribal art tradition. Others look futuristic. Some are small, others large. But of course, Das has his own methods - layering, adding, deleting, painting, inking, pasting, cutting, writing, drawing, Muji tags, et al... till the composition is ready for the viewer to read their own meanings into them.

Graphite head by Amitava Das, 1972

Though 'If We Knew the Point' is a large solo exhibition, on at KNMA Saket till September 30, it interacts with another solo show here - by force of proximity, but also a continuity of kindred styles and inspirations. Titled 'Magic in the Square', the other show celebrates the centenary year of Mohan Samant who was one of the early Bombay Progressive Artists Group along with VS Gaitonde and Krishen Khanna, among others.

"They both (Amitava Das and Mohan Samant) are very interested in pictorial construction. In a way, they are both people who work with a diversity of mediums and techniques and materials, and that became the starting point for me," says Roobina Karode who has curated both shows at KNMA. "These two solo exhibitions will echo and resonate... Imaginatively they are crossing each other's path because of the way that they work. Both are also invested in the figure - what they do with the figure is another thing... For me, the exhibition is a fictional meeting between them."

Mohan Samant centenary

There's a sea of people flocking to the festival in artist Mohan Samant's 'Tourists at the Sea Festival' (1979). Disembodied arms and legs can be seen. As can heads, half hidden away from view. There's a woman with a video camera. Another in a low-cut dress and blue hair. One man's legs are covered in lines that seem to reference Gond art. Reference is the key word in a lot of Mohan Samant's art - for, he drew from 5,000 years of world art and often mushed influences from different places into one frame. Ideas from the Ramayana share space with Mesopotamian art and the sarangi is a constant source of inspiration.

In this work, the paper cutouts of people form a crowd that could be in a coastal city anywhere in the world - Mumbai, Miami? Every time you come back to 'Tourists at the Sea Festival', there's more to see in the folded paper-watercolours-and-ink work. Some detail you had missed in the crowd before. In 2017, Jillian Samant (Mohan Samant's wife) gifted this work to the KNMA. And now it hangs in the KNMA exhibition to honour him in his centenary year.

Mohan Samant's 'Tourists at the Sea Festival'

Born in 1924 (the same year as FN Souza and VS Gaitonde, incidentally), Mohan Samant grew up in Mumbai surrounded by his mother's crafts projects and Raja Ravi Varma's art. He graduated from the Sir JJ School of Art in 1952, and became an associate of the Progressive Artists Group that same year. The 1953 exhibition 'Progressive Artists' Group: Gaitonde, Raiba, Ara, Hazarnis, Khanna, Husain, Samant, Gade' showed his works alongside the other progressives at the Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai. They would have another group exhibition in the next decade, in New York. Like a lot of the Bombay progressives, he moved abroad - he lived in New York from 1959-65 and then from 1968 till his death in 2004. Unlike a lot of the Bombay progressives, though, Samant drew inspiration from art from everywhere and all periods.

Modern art gallery DAG's senior vice-president Kishore Singh says: "The concepts that stayed with him routed art from different cultures, whether it the funerary reliefs from Egypt or frescoes in China or Jain art in India, all of these came together for him in the same composition." Singh adds that "for him, what was very important was how art itself took shape contextually as a very intimate, personal affair. And for him, these were very often in the shape of his memories of his mother." Samant saw his mother embroidering and doing crafts projects like sewing fabrics around the baby's picture (Samant was the fourth of eight kids) around the house, Singh says. This turned him onto "a sense of something tactile, of something new being created using materials that one found around oneself, and their usage was something that stayed with him even though he studied at the JJ School of Art."

Indeed, the show at KNMA includes works where Samant has used sand, gravel, wire, oil, plaster of paris... In a massive 1992 work 'The Serpent of Paradise', there's a tiny moose or antelope towards the bottom of the frame on the left. There's a gigantic foot suspended over it. The foot belongs to what could be a Frankensteinian monster or a troll trying to piggyback on another or maybe Adam? Either way, the creature looks unwieldly, possibly even clumsy. The antelope/moose could be crushed any minute. The serpent is elsewhere - a strange tortoise-chameleon with the long tail of a snake seconds away from biting another figure in this "paradise". If this sounds fanciful, it's a feature of the work, not a bug. There's a bit of magic realism in a lot of Samant's works - difficult to describe, impossible to look away from.

Detail from 'The Serpent of Paradise' by Mohan Samant. Notice the tiny plastic toy at the bottom, just under the giant's foot.

See also 'Descending Angels' (1998), also part of 'Magic in the Square'. Skeletons posed as archaeological finds occur here and elsewhere in Samant's work as he ponders death and decay. The landscape here is barren. The falling angel is at the centre of the work. But all around, on a much smaller scale, there seems to be human activity. Play, work, die, get buried, excavated/exhumed, repeat.

To end, here's what a curatorial note on Samant at KNMA says: "The whimsical play between surface and structure and textural overlays as well as creating magical depths with paper cutouts, his art embraces a range of traditional mediums and mundane, mass-produced material like wire, plastic toys, mirrors, sand, dust, twine, and insect specimens, among others."

Both exhibitions - 'If We Knew The Point' and 'Magic In The Square' - are on at KNMA Saket till September 30.