“All our language is composed of brief little dreams.” – Paul Valery

Art can be a cunning beast, it can throw up all kinds of references and annotations. And when it is unleashed in the hands of a mendicant of aesthetic crucibles it can give us realms within realms.

Meet Simran KS Lamba who delves into the development of new definitions of painting, including the monochrome, creates serial structures, and churns up images that speak of  fire and smoke; at times he weaves in a focus on light, at times ensues a minimalist movement within the framed space; but seems to have a hunger for the interrogation of the relationship between nature, fictitious fantasy, and humankind. It is his unique journey with the use of tar that evinces a rare interest in viewer activation; and the production of evocative art actions, that keep the human gaze alive and thinking long after it is seen no more.

Scream, Lion , Rebellion, Terrace Lilies, Fragments, Queen of Thorns, Woman in the Mirror, Tempest, Swan are just a few titles that you savour in the sojourn of coal tar and colour. Titles in this oeuvre have an academic as well as ecological echo –in his many frames both large and medium he emphasizes the power of gestural abstraction and personal expression, the emerging of a  new approach to painting. He explores the use of single colours and serial structures to achieve a minimal aesthetic. By limiting his palette to one colour at times and applying dense layers of crayons in an all-over treatment, he downplays the hand of the artist and creates a cohesive choreography in which  he points  to painting’s capacity to convey immaterial concepts like energy fields within the landscape of the human mind.

 Moon in a Well is a quixotic work with mythic moorings. It gives us a flashback of stories that we keep in our inner recesses. The little glass piece, the meandering wires and the strokes and squiggles of coal tar add a gravity of gorgeousness to it. You think of time and you think of memory. Memory is like a pile of stories determined by feelings and constantly revised to fit new feelings. The quaintness of this work lies in the suggestion of the narrative even as the subject is more like an abstracted still life. Literary leanings come effortlessly to Simran who is a Masters in Literature.

Calibrated Colour and Coal Tar

In his handling of colour energies, Simran’s minimal compositions and carefully calibrated painting choices take his paintings as close as possible to the emotional and perceptual effects of colour and texture uninhibited by any descriptive constraints of form. “ I look for residual hints in what I create,” says Simran, “ Its about  the beauty of autumn, the still life scene that plays out before my eyes.”  A tiny ridge—the residue of a curly coal tar edge—separates the autumnal toned tree from the frame. The oil paint and use of polishing agents have a mildly reflective eggshell finish. The division of tree and space seems one of natural intuition—just enough to create a supple moody finish with the even vertical strokes of the oil paint’s application. This surface resulted in deep terrain that avoided both glare and the colour-deadening effects of a matte surface.

The Series of Faces works incorporate coal tar, metal sheets, metal filigree,   nails and oil paints. It is the amber tints that create the properties of holding light betwixt the many coagulations of colour. As for his decision to compose within three for our five-foot squares of color, in an interview with this critic, Simran  had this to say: “For days on end, I tried to figure out how the viewer could respond to the coal tar within the tints of  color in the middle of the frame when different textures like nails and metal sheets and filigree and coal tar are placed in the  adjacent areas […] Initially I thought the simple placements  would allow that to happen, but it seemed that the color relationships with the other textural elements dominated the one on which the viewer concentrated, so I began increasing the size of each elements placed within the frame and reducing the colour tones and creating minimal islands […] I finally ended up with what I thought was the ideal frame simply by sitting and looking at it; it turned out to be reflections that could be created in quasi abstract narratives that of course are rooted in reality but born out of my own fictitious notions. ”

The large works, while formally complex, show off Simran’s command of color values as well as project  the intensity of the larger works. In all the large works, Simran distributes the colours along a vertical axis without resorting to symmetry across it. In Series of Faces-8 (Man with Ring), the oil meshed colour and foil moves from a light cobalt amber  to a pale smoky beige across the dominant lower-right/bottom-left axis. Although the colour placement has a pleasing quirkiness, it creates the graphic punch of the prismatic patterns in the ropes that suggest the hair contours. The same is true for Series of Faces-9 Woman in Curls, which has a central band of pure charcoal values interrupting its vertical dulcet colour sweep. It, too, showcases Simran’s pitch-perfect color sense but the foil frames effectively mute the impact in its overall design.

Pulsating Complexity

The works like Tempest, Swan and My Friends  convey a greater energy, in part by their scale, but especially in the symmetrical arrangements around a vertical axis, with the colours either fading or growing in intensity as they move away from the center. The arrangements in works like Tempest and Swan set up pulsations that grow in subtlety and complexity with sustained viewing. Following Cézanne’s dictum that a good painting should be a “color undulation,” Simran moves from the darkened embered end of the spectrum to the textured end of the spectrum as the colour variations travel from the bottom of the canvas  to the top.

The most powerful painting is Cityscape at Night, created with molten metal, coal tar, ink, nails, washers and oil paint. This exceeds all the others in its intensity of tranquil movement, quiet drama, and sense of nocturnal energy. The central axis of saturated colors moves from the moonlit essence of esoteric symbolism on the top to pulsating smoky blue intonations up at the top, creating a distilled plane with the top half  that symmetrically modulates from atmospheric articulations to crusty earth tones in gold and silver striations . The rest of the tonalities fade in a vertical pattern, with the two outermost bottom corners moving closest to indepth incantations. The rapid density in darkness to the lower corners creates a dramatic contrast across the field.

The speed of the transition from the vibrant blue tones at the top and to near black and gold and silver at the edges, along with the downward direction of the fade induces a sense of release and elation in this critic. It is a testament to Simran’s colour mastery that he can play with prismatic color sequences—with just the luminosity of white and blue to give us an evanescent cityscape in which the night is endowed with a complexity and intensity we do not  expect from art that includes the humble coal tar, nails and metal washers as a medium and material.

Intangible Communications

With Simran’s work, the nature of the materiality is different and captured in various manners that suggest the ether of virtual, intangible communications. The virtual field of cosmic energies is important in his works. You discern it in a riveting work entitled Birth that uses coal tar and paint. Translating the multiple imageries stacked around the central crimson tide that holds the face of the human, it is as if birth takes place from the inside of the flame into an expanded physical space, in the most non-literal way possible. What is the nature of thinking in this virtual, centered world? Is it about the way that we often lose focus in this world? Every component is competing for our attention in this work which speaks about the ways in which we mediate our external worlds.

Simran affirms , “ I am interested in the imagery that centers and stabilizes focus. Even though this work incorporates the process and the manner in which we now look at visual images through the mediation of inner rhythms, I blended in the coal tar and oil paint to create an allegory that you could relate to but also be participant of because life has so many struggles and sorrows.”

In some ways in terms of his deep rooted searches Simran reminds me of  Yayoi Kusama’s “Fireflies on the Water” (2002), where she warped installation space. It was physical, and yet not just a single place in terms of intent and approach. It suggested expansion in its use of wall, floor, and ceiling. And through the use of mirrors she also suggested the reflective computer screen, which parallels the virtual realms we now also occupy.

“ I am working on a video art film revolving around an octengenarian freedom fighter depicting the timeline of his struggle and using the mixed media paintings being created on site as various transition points and interjections within the unfolding narrative”says the erstwhile film maker who looks more like a solitary pilgrim in the quest of an artistic nirvana.

“With my work, I am interested in the materiality of painting. I like those kinds of beautiful reflective scenes that can in painting marks be stretched and reinterpreted by the use of the materials like coal tar and ropes and mesh and metal sheets and washers and crayons and oil paints. So I combine techniques and time in front of the basic painted image. You will see that in my work Tiger, its an abstract study that looks at the endangered animal and yet speaks of its magnificent coat. Its such a masterpiece in the theory of evolution. The materialness of painting with the inclusion of textural elements in a noveau manner is important to how my work evolves.”

Coal tar over a canvas, is fascinating- it becomes the source for the completion of the objective because Simran couldn’t have envisioned what that would be like without the materiality of the ideation of colour tones that could be adjacent to black. He couldn’t have painted from looking at a reflective, shiny screen. He needed to see the scale of his sensibilities. Its as if he needs to see a blocking of already-painted imagery alongside its coal tar -altered decipherings. Painting for Simran is an inchoate experience, it goes beyond the mere act of painting – it’s a process that accumulates and builds up into a momentum that must reach a crescendo of cohesive cadences.

Painting then has become more about using these devices and details to make paintings that are incorporated into a personal aesthetic environment. He could not have envisioned paintings and environments without the materiality of his elements and that is why in practice and in his own sensitivity he stands alone and apart.

Sculptural Installations

You need the physical tactility and the immersive, phenomenological experience of your ideations in a space, walking around an object, as well as the objectness of the space itself. Imagine taking iron woks of different sizes and creating a series of deeply quasi spiritual installations that dwell on Radha Krishna,Shiva and other elements of mythic and religious iconography. Simran takes the paradigms of relations of differently colored concentric woks from Kolkata to play on viewers’ spiritual and optical perceptions. In the context of the language of abstraction these sculptural installations have a broader resonance, religious, historical as well as philosophical.

People who know the Bhagvadam and the many upadeshas  will recall wandering through the many verses that speak of the Vishwaroopa, the Radha Krishna allegiance and the stories of Shiva and his symbolism. Simran’s deeper understanding of the tales and the many imageries  that bring us to his works where he plays with the tenets of spectral shadows of other elements with the use of different metals and tonalities on the woks.

The idea of creating the equivocal stance with both sides presents an ethereal and, in a good way, somehow ponderous pathway, as if you might find your way to a clear divine light with time and patience and intuitive reasoning.

The installations have the ability to transport us,  as thoroughly as the original notions because  they are  nicely fitted to their  spaces.  With so much room around it and silhouettes of daylight, it’s immediately and orientingly immersive. When you walk around and look at it from all angles, however, it becomes enveloping and absorbing.

The spaces left in between the woks and the circular holes drilled in the centre  leads to a patterning that is identical but riveting in nature, With its many rhythms and echoes, the whole is like a three-dimensional visual rhetoric containing several religio societal echoes.

Curiously, Simran seems to have a long preoccupation with subtleties of perception, it may be that he intended viewers to be subliminally if not consciously affected by the quasi abstract shapes of the installations.

No doubt each, as an artist Simran employs  spherical and circular formats for his own illustrative  reasons. He also probes us to question why he has taken time to pursue such reductive, seemingly purely formal aesthetics.

But in a deep sense, Simran  has made an extended effort to profoundly alter the collective consciousness of our  time, and in that he shares a utopian ethos. “What I was thinking about was changing the whole visual structure of how I look at the world and this whole system of beliefs,” he explains. “My deeper journeys of solitude and the ramparts of Indian history allowed me to explore the rich content of time again.”