Travelling at night with eyes wide open often draws one to look at the dark. You look out of a plane window and see the clouds, or from a train window to the passing lights, trees or streets and houses. On a ship, you come to the decks and indulge into looking at the sea. What does this act of unpurposeful looking mean to you? One might read and recognize the readable visuals, but might end up with deciphering the dark itself. The engagement with the unreadable starts here….
Nitin Dadrawala’s calligraphic, black marks, seen here, are informed by his knowledge and engagement with cultural histories of artistic production. The artist knew the cultural connotations of black, with the notions of death attached to it. Yet there are odes to black as a ‘mother colour’, to which the present work subscribes. Nitin knew the antiquity of the ink and brush technique, as well as the changing roles and purposes of calligraphy over ages.
To start with, Nitin mellowed the black with water and left a thin wash on his paper. Then came the strokes that had been with him for quite a few years, though hidden in his paintings. The landscape element in his works as well as his tendency for quadratic division of available space stayed with him. Day by day, or night by night (since Nitin preferred to work in the afterhours, then), the works told the artist what they are. Stylistic influences of his past work might be readable to a discerning eye, but for the artist, these calligraphic abstract works opened a different chapter of knowing the white and understanding the black.
During his process, Nitin saw the importance of these works on two overlapping levels: one, as a diary of his everyday moods and energies, and two, as aesthetic statements on par with his canvases. He describes the spiritual aspect of the process as his attempts to… purify the inward tone, the inflated atmosphere of consciousness… to evade rational analysis and imperfections thereof’. While the project of subsuming the rational with the ‘pure human’ might date back to romanticists, Nitin’s works seem to attain their contemporary nirvana. The works do not celebrate the attainment of sagehood. They indulge with the everyday, deal with the mundane and be out of it.
By: Abhijeet Tamhane