REVERSE DECONSTRUCTION

You had seen her as a bright art-student, who perfectly knew how to paint. And now you see her, after she recently won the Kashi Award for Visual Art (Cochin, Kerala) as an artist who rather knows what to paint and WHY.

Her decision to paint the obviousities was in offing even while she pursued her Masters studies. In the premier institute that the JJ School of Art in Mumbai is, the shackles of conservatism had just begun to fall down when Prajakta did her Masters in 2002. She was 'allowed' (if not encouraged) to go on with her plans to pimple-ify the 'portraits', thereby amplifying the nightmares of her gender and age. Not having a smooth skin is like being socially rejected in this world of TV screens dominated by anti-pimple ads... na?

From the class of 2002, Prajakta is here in 2005 to find her own class. She is, after all, a non-European, non-US, an Indian, a Maharastrian, a Mubaiite, from Borivli, and... well, from her home. If you look at that stack of newspapers tucked in the corner that's left even as the TV-showcase is kept to fit the place, you might not think it is HER home. But how could she photograph those so- very- private corners that get covered of done up when even the 'train-frieds' visit a mubai home?

Next door neighbours were soft targets. One watches prajakta's peering now from the home corners to the corners of common passages, shared balconies. Then, to the corners of her city... the dumping grounds by the Mumbai sea, in a far-off suburb.

The same peering, with the same amount of in(tro)spection had once looked at pimples, and had faced them as an aesthetic challenge to what remained the 'usual standard' for a college-girls facial skin. Now, the gaze is at home- neighbourhood- city.

The aesthetic challenge that these unattended yet unseen corners pose, gets a 'painterly' twist... one might call it a trick that Prajakta had learnt because (and/ or) despite being a student who knew how to paint.

Her choice of colours, at the works on display in Mumbai recently, looked like what a 'perfect' digital print ( a print that retains all the luminousity that you see on your monitor). At the same time, the use of brush, as an extension of hand, was discernible. The brushwork might not be noticeable, but the texural renderings, the Luc Tuymans way of gradations and remnants of a water-colour landscape painter's trait of leaving the paper-white blank at highlights, are visible. The perfection in colour and the fact that it is 'hand-made', or made by human intervention, adds drama of looking at a painting.

The 'drama in everyday' that the viewer has been knowing through the acts of genre painting and photographers' work ('a day in the life of'), gets a discursive twist in Prajakta's paintings. They invite the viewer to look at the well-intervened object, but put a bar that prohibits them to enjoy the object. Prajakta's work does not romanticise (like Vermeer did). The 'skill' of a human-interest photographer, to allure the moment sothat it lives its own life, is decidedly kept aside when Prajakta shoots those corners, before she takes to the acrylic colours and cainssein paper in her studio. She seems of the kind who wants her camera-notes typically imperfect.Then, to construct itself becomes an exercise in deconsrtruction. While it is arguable that most of the deconstructionist, post 1990s painters in India have been doing so, Prajakta deserves her cudos for making her 'Reverse Deconstrucion' memorable.

- Abhijeet Tamhane