Kaushlesh Kumar’s works are manifestations of a materialistic world, says Johny ML.
Kaushlesh Kumar generally titles his works as ‘Heart to Hardware’; something from impalpable to really palpable. On the one hand his works speak of immateriality in pure abstract terms and on the other, they are manifestations of a materialistic world. The aesthetic content of his works oscillates from tender feelings to hardcore realities of life; in their deceptively simple appearance they carry the essence of life.
Kaushlesh’s works could be approached from various perspectives, which I would qualify as an open perspective that we see in the Mughal miniatures. The difference is that Kaushlesh resists any kind of visual narratives in his works. He wants them to be purely visual entities that could be ‘felt’ without a narrative. However, human beings are story making organisms. They cannot live without narratives; they make stories and believe or analyse the stories that others make.
Coming back to perspective and narratives, Kaushlesh employs three different forms of narratives in his works; one is the normal ‘eyelevel’ perspective, through which his works could be approached frontally, as if it were an event or a moment from an event happening right in front of someone’s eyes. This could also be called a vertical perspective that facilitates a circular viewing; the viewer could run his eyes in a clockwise movement.
The second perspective is horizontal where the verticality is flattened and circularity of vision is stilled. The painting becomes a strip of horizontality where the visual essence of the painting converges. The viewer then sees only the essential detail of the painting from which he could gain the aesthetical prowess the artist has shown in there.
The third perspective is that of a bird, a view from up, a topographical view as if in a google map. Kaushlesh facilitates the virtual tilting of the human body in a one eighty-degree plane. The hovering effect literally makes the heart see the overall materiality that we experience in our earthly lives. Kaushlesh builds up his pictorial surface using multiple visual tropes. Layer by layer he conceals the original ‘body’ of the canvas and creates a world that is alternatively hazy and transparent.
The merging of colours with different densities appears like the sonic fusion of musical notes generated by different musical instruments. Some portions spring up from the pictorial surface, as if they were some magical moon stones waiting to be discovered. Kaushlesh employs alphabetical stencils as visual notations in his works, turning the paintings into an interface where the textual metamorphosing into visual and vice versa. The interplay between the textual and visual gives an added valency to Kaushlesh paintings, turning the works into an indecipherable magical language, a secret, an experience that cannot be shared with anybody else in the world and a silence registered in our minds.
Geometrical invocations as a structural trope come natural to Kaushlesh as his painterly approach is not about brushworks alone. He constantly merges and submerges his images and visual notations as if he is creating a tower of Babel, a project that is ambitious but left unfinished by providential intervention. Therefore, Kaushlesh’s works could be seen as the ultimate creative efforts of humans and the pleasures and pains involved in it.
Johny ML is an eminent art curator, cultural critic and writer based in New Delhi.
