Frank Stella’s immortal words, “What you see is what you see”, would perhaps be the best way to capture the essence of CIMA’s ongoing exhibition, Less is More: Minimalism to Abstraction in Indian Art (on view at the gallery till February 28). Minimalism’s reductive forms and abstraction’s freedom from representation force a specific kind of attention. When recognisable imagery disappears, and all excesses are removed, the viewer is left with what cannot be avoided: scale, proportion, surface, rhythm, weight. There is nothing to decode in the usual sense. The works do not point elsewhere; they insist on being encountered as they are. Minimalist and abstract tendencies in Indian art do not simply mimic Western models. They predate such models in indigenous understandings of form, space and visual restraint, such as yantras and mandalas and even Warli and Gond paintings by proponents like Kishore Sadashiv Mashe, Durga Bai Vyam and Lado Bai, among others. Shedding light on this legacy is perhaps the most singular contribution of Less is More. The over 100 works gathered there place the viewer in a position of heightened attentiveness, echoing older visual traditions and their continuity in contemporary idioms.
Visually, the artist who carried forward the concentrated field of energy, memory, and cosmological order that was captured in yantras and mandalas would be S.H. Raza with his bindu. If Raza focused on the dot, S. Harsha Vardhana used the triangle as the anchor for his landscapes, while for Rm Palaniappan, it is the line that contorts itself to encapsulate the human essence. Ganesh Haloi’s quiet landscape of memory is shaped by turning triangles, arcs, and planes into fields, birds and sights that hold emotion without naming it. Jagdish Swaminathan and V.S. Gaitonde captured the simplicity and primal force of the tribal idiom in their respective works. Other artists, such as Samindranath Majumdar, Rajendra Dhawan, Badhan Das, Sandeep Mahipat Bobade, Vishakha Apte, Yashpal Singh, Pradip Rakshit and Kingshuk Sarkar, pared down shapes and lines further into smudges of colour, cross-hatchings, and contouring that skirted on the edge of the viewer’s recognition, refusing to be pinned down yet also intensely familiar. Others still, like Jeram Patel, Prabhakar Kolte, Pandit Bhila Khairnar, Akhilesh Varma and Hemant Prakash Dhane, do away with shapes and distil their vision into pure fields of colours that bled and shapeshifted into emotional environments where feeling is carried by scale, tone, and duration of looking.
Himmat Shah, Sarbari Roy Chowdhury, Sushen Ghosh, and Bimal Kundu do with bronze, brass and clay what their peers do with paint — refining form and motion into sculptural works that are as fluid as they are emotive. Somnath Hore’s mask of Rabindranath is the very soul of meditative simplicity. His Wounds series replicates scarred surfaces and ruptured flesh with the barest of marks on white paper. Mona Rai’s canvas was wounded too, with gashes tearing right across it, barely held together by rudimentary stitches, while Priyanka Chandwani turns fraying gauze into a metaphor for wounds that will never heal. Ganesh Pyne renders his Speaking Stone as a mute witness, dense with silence and menace. Ram Kumar shaped jagged, topographical contours where fractured planes and muted tones accumulate into a steady, ambient despair that seeps through the surface. Shakila Sekh achieves an amazingly textured and sculptural landscape with her paper collage. K.C.S. Paniker fused script, symbol, and fractured geometry into dense pictorial fields where marks behave like language under pressure, hovering between meaning and mystery. M.F. Husain’s Now-I (picture) carves a restless figure, treating time as a charged moment of reckoning.
The interplay of light with architectural, structural and geological planes throws stark shadows and forms layered piles and intricate lattices in the works of Manoj S. Kachangal, Khokan Giri, Pratap Manna and Attri Chetan, while Durgesh Birthare and Shreyasi Chatterjee turn stipples into three-dimensional landscapes. Less is More gathers more artists than a single review can contain. It shows that Indian minimalism and abstraction are not marginal experiments but a deep, ongoing continuum where reduction sharpens attention and intensifies meaning. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue of insightful essays and stunning reproductions of the artworks at the show, and more.