GALLERY OF DISGUISES

66" x 54"

LOOKING FOR THE BODY IN A GALLERY OF DISGUISES

The sea outside Brinda Chudasama Miller's balcony unfolds like a bale of muslin. Suddenly, the serene seascape is punctured by an emphatic observation by the artist : "I hate symmetry". A strange assertion, considering that there was a time when Brinda worked strictly by the code of the ruler. Once upon a time, she would have been afraid of breaking a taboo if a circle accidentally turned into a square in her inventive fingers. To unveil this conundrum, we must travel two decades into the past. In 1979, after obtaining a diploma in textile design at the Sir J. J. School of Art, Brinda joined the design department of leading textile mill. Very soon, however, she realised that her dream of becoming the chief designer would remain unfulfilled. She could not resign herself to the endless reproduction of floral designs. It was only a decade later, at the Parsons School of Design in New York, that she unlearned the mechanical precision associated with a designer's work and experienced the creative freedom enjoyed by the painter. At first, she drew birds and mountains in soft pastels. Then her palette changed to accommodate a poisonous green, weather bitten rust and earth-fired yellows and reds. The human presence does appear in her current acrylics, but only in the form of bodies shaped like cardboard cutouts. In her recent works, Brinda has emptied the human form of its muscles and ligaments, skinned it to the bare bones. While the bodies in these paintings become empty cases, the heads sometimes turn into clothes-hangers. But we are faced with the absence of skin or cloth which can be draped around the question-marked hooks of these hangers. It is as the bodies were posing an unanswered query to the viewer. Although the bodies may look like abandoned cabinets, they are set against an intricately layered landscape that fills up their hollow cavities; sometimes, the body becomes a clothes-horse draped with a sheet of sunlight. However, in a few of the canvases, the natural elements do not appear merely as cloth or treated skin, but take on concrete and tactile shapes : a sky-blue crescent or a charred sun then portrays the angry remains of the day. Interestingly, Brinda outlines these spectral bodies through the use of the 'resist' and 'discharge' techniques that are associated with the making of textiles. She employs these techniques to make her figures stand out against the multiple coats of paint that threaten to overshadow them. For instance, when the outline of a body is 'resisted' against a rust-coloured background through the application of wax - as in a batik print - the result is a stark white contour that reinforces the body's skeletal emptiness.

Diptych 36" x 24"	Diptych 48" x 34"

Similarly, when discharge paint is applied over an already painted body, it reacts with the acrylic paint below it and erases it. The bare texture of the canvas is then seen on the periphery of this body. This process of elimination is also seen in the ridged effect when Brinda applies resin on the canvas and then scrapes it away with the back of a paint brush. When the ridged surface is painted, therefore, only the raised portions of the canvas catch the color. To add to this play of tones and textures, she goes on to stick pieces of corrugated cardboard torn from second-hand cartons on her canvases - and covers these pieces, too, with a repeating pattern of circles.

Although the bodies may look like abandoned cabinets, they are set against an intricately layered landscape that fills up their hollow cavities; sometimes, the body becomes a clothes-horse draped with a sheet of sunlight. However, in a few of the canvases, the natural elements do not appear merely as cloth or treated skin, but take on concrete and tactile shapes : a sky-blue crescent or a charred sun then portrays the angry remains of the day.Interestingly, Brinda outlines these spectral bodies through the use of the 'resist' and 'discharge' techniques that are associated with the making of textiles.

She employs these techniques to make her figures stand out against the multiple coats of paint that threaten to overshadow them. For instance, when the outline of a body is 'resisted' against a rust-coloured background through the application of wax - as in a batik print - the result is a stark white contour that reinforces the body's skeletal emptiness.Similarly, when discharge paint is applied over an already painted body, it reacts with the acrylic paint below it and erases it. The bare texture of the canvas is then seen on the periphery of this body. This process of elimination is also seen in the ridged effect when Brinda applies resin on the canvas and then scrapes it away with the back of a paint brush. When the ridged surface is painted, therefore, only the raised portions of the canvas catch the color. To add to this play of tones and textures, she goes on to stick pieces of corrugated cardboard torn from second-hand cartons on her canvases - and covers these pieces, too, with a repeating pattern of circles.Delicately striped, these circles float like bubbles on the edge of the canvas, creating a sense of buoyancy. And these bubbles of delight are in turn juxtaposed against the harshly knifed surface on the opposite end of the canvas. The collaged portions of the painting do not look like gimmicks tacked on the ensemble for the sake of effect; rather, they blend harmoniously into the overall composition of the painting.Brinda does not aim to generate a clean, complete painting in the approved academic manner. Operating in a self-reflexive manner, she draws the viewer's attention to the materials and the process of making within the art-works themselves. She allows the paint to drizzle across the canvas so that the sharply scissored profile of the body cutouts are freed, even if temporarily, of their painful straightness. She removes the dried circles of paint that have stuck to the rim of the acrylic paint bottle and sticks them like pieces of broken bangles on the canvas; or then she uses the cap of the paint bottle to mark the painted surface.

In a striking diptych (left), these cap-marked red circles float freely in the air, even as a robotic figure seemingly dressed in green army fatigues, stretches out his hand to a man locked in a prison of his own making. The prisoner's head is designed from a ball of crumpled tracing paper stuck on the canvas : painted black, it looks like a burnt sun. And while the robotic figure may resemble Brinda's other cutout figures, the similarity ends when we observe the imperious gesture of its hand : the reference to the triumphal and self-glorifying monuments of Rameses seems unmistakeable. An ochre fire burns behind this pharaonic robot as he point to a new hieroglyphy, one that spells violence without respite. The only element connecting the two panels of the diptych - apart from the sterile outstretched hand - is an incomplete rainbow of blood. The allegory requires no further elucidation.

Strangely, if we look at the techniques Brinda employs in her work, we could perhaps hear the sounds of a military operation. Terms like 'resist', 'eliminate', 'scrape' and 'discharge' may just accidentally coincide with the phraseology of military routine. But it cannot be denied that the viewer is compelled to unveil the intricate layers of paint that both camouflage as well as reveal the terrain on which the hollowed cutouts enact their dance of death. One is reminded of the cadences of T.S. Eliot's poem, 'The Hollow Men':

"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless."

Even though Brinda's 'hollow men' are incarcerated in their respective grids, they sometimes make an attempt to lean on their neighbours, their 'dried voices' stirring towards birth. This brings us to the sequence of glass paintings, another medium in which Brinda enjoys working, because of its perfidious transparency.

Brinda wants the viewer to look both at the front and the rear sides of the painting. When she draws an African face on one side and sticks silver foil on the other, for instance, she expects the viewer to experience the dual excitement of the glittering reflection of the foil behind the face on one side, and also observe the patch of silver turn into a figure on the black background of the other side. Brinda also sticks tie-and-dye patterned paper on one side of a painting and paints over it on the other, exploring the intimate relationship between manufactured pattern and spontaneous gesture. The viewer's relationship to the glass painting is like that of the body asking the soul whether it really exists.

As for the faces themselves, they resemble masks. Inspired by African ritual symbology, these faces are a gallery of archetypes : nocturnal green stands for the forest, orange for fire and black for the unfulfilled animus. Large brooding eyes stare unflinchingly at us. Brinda has always been interested, not in the body as such, but in the many disguises and plastic representations through which it becomes known to us. Ominous Javanese masks, long-necked and Modiglianiesque African busts, an African sculpture with children crawling out of a womb-like basket and many such artefacts, smelling of earth, adorn her living room. And, of course, there and seven chairs around the dining table : an image of urbane, domestic order subverted by the deliberate choice of an odd number.

It is unevenness of life that enchants Brinda - not the perfection of the round circle, but its blurred edges. However, the faces in the glass paintings have yet to break through their frozen skins; their eyes are opening slowly to the world. I would like to end with an evocation of one of her glass paintings, one that does not have a face, mask-like or otherwise. In a brightly painted black, white and yellow grid, umber figures, rendered in fluid outlines, whisper softly. One of them appears to be looking for something on a biscuit-brown table that holds the quintessential element of still life, a vase : but this vase is fatigued by its history of decorative use, it contains no flowers. And if you allow your gaze to slip from the table to the ground, you will be fascinated by the black and white weave emerging from a loom. At the top of the loom hovers a milk-white cloud of thread.

Is the artist trying to show us, perhaps, the healing nature of cotton before it became an armour for the embattled body? With Brinda, we return to the basics of creativity : like Kabir, she tells us that we must learn to weave our robes with the threads of our own bodies.

NANCY ADAJANIA
Bombay, June 1999