‘Cities: Built, Broken’: A magnificent solo of Sudhir Patwardhan's recent work
Summary
The ongoing solo show spotlights Sudhir Patwardhan as a documentarian of the human condition, a witness to the big and small movements that besiege the world he is living in
Sudhir Patwardhan, 76, points at a large 50x76 inch painting occupying the better part of a wall on the third floor of Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi, where Cities: Built, Broken, a magnificent solo show of his recent work is on. “This one is called War Zone Studio," he says. “It’s based on my own studio." It’s difficult to convey the topsy-turvy impact of this masterpiece in words. At a glance, the interiors of the studio seem to crumple like paper. Two figures, alluding to the artist, lie on a sofa and sit in a corner respectively. There is also a third, busy at work, hovering at the bottom of the painting, depicted from an upside-down perspective, as if reflected on a mirror. In the middle of the room is a gaping hole, a menacing vortex into which the ambient chaos of paper, paint, books and furniture may disappear any moment. Painted last year, this is a portrait of the artist as an anxious soul, pondering the futility of his work, as well as the purpose of art, in a world that is falling to pieces.
“I started by taking photos of my studio," Patwardhan says, “then, I processed those images in Photoshop, juxtaposed the fragments, and finally began painting." Patwardhan has followed this process for years. Before the availability of digital editing software, he would use the humble tracing paper to create a map of the imagery. It’s a technique that allows him to break the laws of reality even while working within a largely realistic paradigm. In this exhibition, in particular, there is a spectacular amalgamation of odd, intersecting planes—in Built and Broken, 65x80 inches, for instance—leaving the viewer mesmerised, suspended between a state of vertigo and disorientation. Next, Patwardhan turns around to the facing wall, where he points out a fuller version of the same fragment of the artist at work from the previous painting.
The careless viewer may have missed this mirroring effect, but the déjà vu, which has become a signature style for Patwardhan over the years, would have haunted them. Looking at some of his best loved work, especially the crowd scenes, has always been an exercise in learning to see, to pick out the odd one from the melee of sameness, to be struck by the melancholy of a face among a gathering of faceless millions, to be reminded about one’s own life and predicament.
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Everything is broken
In Cities: Built, Broken, as the title indicates, the physician-turned-artist trains his keen eye on the changing anatomy of his beloved home city of Bombay (now Mumbai). “There has been an infrastructure boom since covid-19," he says. “In 10 years, when the Metro lines are up and running, Bombay will be good again. But the present cannot become a subsidiary to that future." Inevitably, the frantic pace of construction is leaving a trail of collateral damage in its wake. As shanties are uprooted, homes destroyed, and livelihoods disrupted, there is a rise in discontent among the homeless and disenfranchised. “I wanted to capture how the constant sense of things hanging overhead all the time affects pedestrians," says Patwardhan, pointing at compositions that zoom in and out of the cityscape.
Like the dizzying labyrinths of 18th-century Italian painter Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s prisons of the mind, the stairs, highways, skywalks and street scenes create a matrix of instability in the viewer. “Being on the road is an important source of inspiration for me," as the artist says. “When I first arrived in Bombay from Pune in the 1970s, I was fascinated by the scale of the mills and high-rises. But now, travelling through the city has a feeling of endlessness, as Mumbai continues to push against its margins into newer terrains."
This interplay of verticality and horizontal expanse informs the poetics of inequality in Patwardhan’s vision of life, too. As political and economic shifts befall Mumbai, the incidence of crime and poverty becomes starker. In the paintings, street violence erupts into blinding rage, a man lying by a water body seems to have been defeated by the battle to live, a scene of small-scale destruction unfolds behind a bus stop. Shadowy characters lurk along the edges of gatherings. Such montages revive memories of wars, seen and unseen, of cities bombed and wiped out, populations persecuted out of their homes. These paintings are testimony to a running theme in Patwardhan’s recent work: the meaning of art in our broken times and the role of the artist.
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The artist’s way
Like many of his older contemporaries— M.F. Husain, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Bhupen Khakhar—Patwardhan is a documentarian of the human condition, a witness to the big and small movements that besiege the world he is living in. Cities: Built, Broken is haunted by the spectres of the war on Gaza and beyond, especially growing incidents of violence against minority communities in India. A close-up portrait of a woman’s grief-stricken face against a wall is, the artist explains, a reference to the wailing wall of Jerusalem.
In another work, a JCB runs aground homes into rubble—a reference to the prevailing mode of “bulldozer justice" targeted mostly at economically disadvantaged Muslim communities. The craters and potholes of Bombay begin to resemble a city under attack—from the votaries of civic growth at the expense of lives considered less than worthy of dignity. In this artist’s work, war doesn’t come only at the end of a barrel; it is a shapeshifting creature that deceives and poisons insidiously. “As you look at the violence and injustice around the world, the ridiculousness of the hyped-up narrative of development becomes evident," says Patwardhan.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, as W.B. Yeats famously wrote. The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity. True as the sentiment may ring today, in the end it is to the best that humanity looks to in times of moral and civilisational crisis. Against a backdrop of hectic development, a local train drives by, with a woman staring out of it with dream-laced eyes. The monstrous tentacles of urbanism that sweep around her cannot dim her singular spark. A ghostly figure comes to a standstill in the middle of a busy Irani cafe, suddenly arrested by the horrors that lurk beyond the convivial space.
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A spirit of resilience runs through the bodies of his co-citizens, foot soldiers of development, who must keep the wheels of the city turning, come what may. The most iconic representation of this belief comes through in Just People, a 70x54-inch mural-like work, throbbing with a crowd going about their day, all of them painted in a pale, greyish yellow tint. From welders hunched on the street to food sellers, from autorickshaw drivers to commuters, there is an array of bodies caught in a rush.
“I was inspired by the crowd scenes in the Ajanta caves here," Patwardhan says, pointing at one corner, where a man rides a horse, with a canopy over his head. “I wanted to show people living their lives, without thinking of religion and caste." Indeed, it’s a quintessential Indian slice of life, where differences dissolve—not into a utopian future when all humans are equal and thriving, but in everyday moments of forgetfulness, where the very act of living and letting live overshadows petty rivalries and social hierarchies.
At Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53, Defence Colony, Delhi, till 4 March. The show will travel to Mumbai, Kolkata and Kochi in the coming months.
