Nikhil  Bhandari

Nikhil Bhandari with wife Sujata at his show in Rome ,April 2008

Photography in a new key

Mukund Lath

   Nikhil was a student of art before he took to photography. He wanted, expectedly, to combine the two. It is not rare among photographers to produce images that have the ambience of a work of art, but the attempt, however powerful and evocative, remains within the possibilities of conventional photography where the camera is used as an instrument to record what the eye can see. The processes used in the dark-room do not change the basic character of the image, but are used in order to obtain a desired ‘finish’. What Nikhil has achieved goes much further. He has succeeded in using photography as a medium to create images that are unique and autonomous. Indeed, the images he has come up with are not only works of art on their own, but, importantly, are possible only through an innovative use of the entire process of photography. In his hands, the medium as whole is transformed, even transfigured, into a novel and singular palette, which is as full of possibility and as open to the exploration of visual meaning as any other medium of art, and yet, quite different from them.

   Nikhil began his journey through a process of transposition: placing one image over another and then amalgamating them into an independent vision, distinct in itself. He has used this process of juxtaposing images both in black-and-white as well as in colour. The process of transposition that Nikhil uses might remind one of the painterly techniques of laying down more than one coat of different paints one above the other on a canvas in order to achieve a depth, texture and tone not possible otherwise. But, as one can see, there is a great difference: transposition of images not only creates a new hue or sheen, but a totally different vision altogether. The process, especially in Nikhil’s hands, is in fact, unique to the medium of photography, being, also quite different from abstraction or expressionism or any other process known in painting. It is something which immediately reveals the new possibilities that photography as an art is capable of.

   But Nikhil has not stopped here. The process of transposition, however innovative, does not yet attain the freedom that a medium should be able to achieve: the creation of significant images free of the vestiges of what one can see and record. One might even think that photography as a medium is not capable of taking this leap. But Nikhil has succeeded in doing so. His latest images have hardly anything ‘recognizable’, they are powerful visions on their own. Nikhil’s oeuvre has such self-sufficient images both in black and white and in colour, as one can see. I would like to say something about the quality of colour Nikhil has been able to envisage. The colour, remarkable for its clarity and brilliance, seems to materialize from the background as if floating out of it and standing free in a space of its own with the image it embodies. This seems to me to be due to the fact that a three-dimensional space is natural to photography, while the image itself is conceived as flat and two-dimensional. However, the glow, the luminous shades of red, yellow-gold, green, blue and especially black and their many-hued blends that appear on Nikhil’s canvas, are singular to the art that Nikhil has been practicing. It is remarkable, too, that the larger the print, the greater the clarity and the glory of the colours that emerge.

   I would like to end by saying that I am happy to have been a witness to Nikhil’s novel journey of exploration right from its beginning, and to have shared his excitement. 

The emancipation of light

An amorphous abundance unfolds into spatialized ensemble. The solids have liquefied into light, they have almost become gaseous and the print has given them the substance back. The alchemy of light deconstructs not only the object, but the construct of photographic image is also under scrutiny. Before each of Nikhil Bhandari’s pictures invite a viewer’s passions with their theatrical appeal, a glace at the installation view at the gallery might generate critical questions: what is it that we are looking at? How do we classify it? Is the blur a metaphor for the paradigm shifts in visual art?

Non-representative photography has evolved from the early twentieth century with the photographers’ zeal to use the medium ‘by itself’. The experiments by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, or the ‘Vortographs’ by Alvin Coburn are a case in point. However, the interpretations of the ‘non-representational’ within photography have changed over time, as pictorial photography asserted itself vis-à-vis the documentary mode. The fine example from India would be the photographs by Ashwin Mehta. Mehta’s pictures record a decipherable image, but inherit suggestions and allegories that might differ from the image. Thus, the ‘subject’ is not to be represented per se. Another stream in ‘non-representative photography’ grew in a rather academic way, and intended either to render the object unidentifiable by accentuating and enlarging the details, or to conceal the image by the use of filters and effects.

Nikhil Bhandari’s technique revisits the notion of integrity of the equipment to picture-making process. His use of multiple lights, slide-projections and his emphasis on recording the image as reflected on a mirror-like surface, are a priori to his moment of clicking. It might sound classicist to stay with a non-digital camera, but Nikhil does it, as if to retain the purity of the recorded picture against the altered results. Nikhil’s studio-setting might remind of the three mirrors that Coburn had placed between his subject and his camera. Nikhil does not use mirrors, but has a flexible surface that would reflect but not reveal the reflection.

The theatricality that the colours carry, can be traced back to Nikhil’s studio where the ‘stills’ are recorded from a multitude of movements. Nikhil makes his models move and sometimes respond to music through their movements, he makes his assistant move the mirror-like surface, and then he moves around, to click. The rehearsals for this theatre of still and movement begins with note-making about lights. Nikhil thoughtfully chooses from among the repertoire of his colour transparencies for projections, and apprehends which kind of lights would work in tandem or contrast with the chosen slide projection. By then, a seasoned photographer would almost visualize the result. Nikhil deconstructs this cause and effect relationship with the element of movement. Movement thus becomes the first step towards ‘emancipation’ of light as attempted by Nikhil.

Where do the lights take us, then?

One might also ask, where do the lights take themselves? Do they make pretty pictures or do they tell something more. While the notion of soothing/enchanting visuals is best left to individual taste, we move on the cerebral appeal of the pictures. They look like computer-generated images which they are certainly not. The works  remind us of the historical experiments in non-representative photography but the present work is independent. The pictures reveal or suggest some existence of body or object but the revelation is incidental.

The fluid rules over the form in Nikhil’s pictures. The prints confront us as if we read a map of a constantly changing geography. Though the amorphous movements, islands and seas of colour keep their pliability alive. Within the forms, tectonic plates of  the known keep colliding with the unknown.

One might contemplate abstraction in India vis-à-vis Nikhil’s present suite of pictures. Nikhil falls in line with his predecessors in so far as the holistic approach to an image goes. He shares the spiritual instinct that lays a foundation for acceptance of non-image as an image. Yet, Nikhil is not an abstract expressionist, nor a constructivist. He differs from the two streams in Western history of modern art. At best, one could relate to the hedonism of  Howard Hodgkin (or Bose Krishnamachari, in India) on one end and  the ‘ruined abstraction’ of Gerhard Richter. While Richter ‘wipes’ the finished formalist, representative work and ‘ruins’ it till abstraction is attained, Nikhil’s reference to a bodily form and its negation is akin to Richter. I see no links in Hodgkin and Nikhil except the formal similarity of an animated, moving form.

As we let the pictures work upon us and as their interpretations or vibes grow on us, we begin thinking differently. At once, we get the suggestion of foetal fluids and maybe a female body, after which one might think of the vanishing female re-foetesizing herself. The magic of such individual semantics, as the pictures make way for their generative grammar. We see the aesthetics of abundance amorphosized in ascetic acts of light. We no longer see the pictures, we inhale them, as if they contain the aroma of their light.

 his works at TERMINAL 3 - New Delhi

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