Indian Artists Network holds show in Jakarta

Novan Iman Santosa, Jakarta

Following a successful exhibition last year, the Indian Artists Network staged its second showcase at the World Trade Center exhibition hall, Jl. Sudirman, South Jakarta.

Opened by the Indian ambassador to Jakarta on May 17, the exhibition -- which will end on Thursday -- displays the work of 30 Indian artists from a variety of backgrounds and styles.

The network groups a large number of artists from various fields, including the performing arts and fine arts.

While last year's theme was Our Roots are Our Wings, this year's is Living with dignity is the only fine art in life.

"Everything else is commercial art for survival," said Ajit Vahadane from the network.

Contemporary paintings created by young, promising Indian artists highlight the exhibition this year, together with some paintings already exhibited last year.

Visitors can also enjoy traditional Indian paintings that use natural dyes on silk depicting fragments from the Ramayana tale, which center on King Rama's efforts to find his wife, Queen Sita, who was abducted by the evil King Rahwana.

Another type of traditional Indian painting on display is Rajashtani miniature painting, which usually pictures a royal procession with a nobleman riding on a horse and many courtiers walking alongside him.

This year, Vahadane has also brought three talented young artists with him. They are Deepak Jogdand from Mumbai and Siddharth Parasnis and Suhas Bhujbal from San Francisco, California.

Jogdand has just earned his master of fine arts degree, and is not only a painter but also a graphic artist well versed in etching and lithography. When painting, he prefers watercolors, and loves depicting urban landscapes with "rustic" brushwork and simple strokes.

"I don't pay attention to detail because I just want to capture an impression of a place.

"As for my graphics work, it is a deep emotional response to the external as well as internal observation of nature, which spontaneously gets transformed into a variety of flowing lines and complex forms," Jogdand said. His two compatriots are still working on their final projects at the Academy of Arts College in San Francisco.

Besides Jogdand, urban landscape has also attracted the attention of Parasnis and Bhujbal, each with his own style.

"I'm always interested in architectural forms as they provide scope to play with planes and shadow, as well as hues," said Parasnis.

"It is quite amazing that my paintings seem to have universal values," he said.

Parasnis said that while most of his paintings were based on houses in his home country, he had a similar reaction when visiting Santa Fe with its native American adobe structures.

"I can even find it here in Jakarta. I don't put a distinctive house styling in my paintings because it is not my intention.

"Last September I held a solo exhibition in the Netherlands and I got so many buyers from Morocco because they thought my paintings were of Moroccan houses," he said.

Parasnis works mainly with mixed media on canvas and paper as he wants to create a more rustic texture on the surface.

"Besides, there are a lot of new media available on the market and I've always wanted to experiment with them to get the texture created by different media."

In contrast to Parasnis, Bhujbal prefers a cleaner texture using acrylic on canvas.

"My work creates a flatter image than Parasnis', which is full of texture. The effect is different," he said while pointing to his 66 centimeter by 66cm acrylic, Moonlight, on canvas.

Among the work of senior painters, Tuka Jadhav's abstract, Conflict in Galaxy, is one of the largest, being a 160cm by 205cm oil on canvas.

One of Jadhav's highlighted achievements was the auctioning of his painting by Christy's in 2001 in India.

After two consecutive exhibitions in Indonesia, Vahadane said that the group would come again next year with a different range of work.

"I received suggestions from many painting enthusiasts not to mix the displays, so next year we shall hold the exhibition in three different galleries: "One for traditional Indian paintings, another for graphics work and another for creative paintings," he said, while acknowledging that such an arrangement would be more difficult to put on and require more funding.