Oil, acrylic, household gloss and charcoal pencil on linen
228.6 x 345.4 （厘米）
90.0 x 136.0 （吋）
Jitish Kallat Arterial Punctuations and Tidal Laughter, 2013 Oil, acrylic, household gloss and charcoal pencil on linen Diptych: 90 x 136 inches This painting of Jitish Kallat evoke a vast terrain forged of people, their heads flourishing – quite literally – with the bustle of daily life. Haircuts, composed of bicycles and livestock, dump-trucks and schoolhouses, pedestrians and merchants, sprout like cornucopias of ambition and imagination, binding all together, sustaining the skyline of Mumbai. It’s a celebration of community, a kind of hippie mural or album cover design, tripping on the vibe of grass roots righteousness and psychedelic utopia. Each and every figure is a real person, faithfully rendered from photos taken outside a train station, their transientvexistence validated and monumentalized, nameless heroes of a cyclical (r)evolution. Jitish Kallat’s social realism encapsulates the very spirit of locality, its history and aspirations, with unnerving accuracy. There’s no coincidence that Jitish Kallat approaches painting as erasure. His colours bleed and dapple, assert ghostly form, play tricks of light; concocted from watery elixirs, applied and scraped off, misted with corrosive liquids, each layer melting seamlessly into the next in biological and alchemical continuity.
