REVIEWS

In the grand plan of the unknown powers that help the world move, regenerate and destroy itself, human beings are smaller entities. However, they think that they can hold the course of events, control it and redirect it. And in this falsified notion of control and power over nature and other fellow beings, the contemporary human beings revel only to know at some point in life that they are nothing; more nothing than nothingness itself. This awareness of nothingness, instead of destroying a human being takes him/her to higher planes of life, making the person an enlightened being. But alas! Look around and see how people are running away from this impending awareness by wearing masks in order to hide the fear and terror they feel before the higher forms of truth and reality.

Rajkot born, self taught artist, Aarti Zaveri curiously looks at this human exodus towards the land of falsified promises; of desire, greed and avarice. She could see, from an artistic vantage point, the pain and struggle they face in their travel. Still they are hopeful about the ‘new life’ kept in reserve for them in future. Zaveri’s paintings elucidate and comment on this exodus and the intrinsic critique involved in these works of art flags out the points and the escape routes for the human beings who are ready to wake themselves into awareness of nothingness and escape to the world of reality and pure bliss.

It is interesting to notice an artist of Aarti Zaveri’s exposure and experience and analyze the imageries and metaphors that she creates in her painterly renditions. The image of mask and the dreamy eyed meditative expression on them cannot have come from mere spiritual meanderings of a lazy mind. It should have come from deeper and intense encounters with the realities that are not generally experienced by the ordinary human beings in their quotidian lives. The speciality of Zaveri’s spirituality is her daily confrontation with glory, death and above all the glory of death. This glory of death wipes out all the pangs felt by the people who are close to the deceased. But at the other end of this glorification, one finds a life that is cleansed by pathos that eventually proves that the meaning of life is the bliss of nothingness. Hence, living a life of compassion and realization is better than living a life of avarice, greed and gluttony.

Aarti Zaveri has this rare opportunity to be the portrait artist of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Presidential Office of India. Her job there is to paint the portraits of the high ranking military men, dignitaries and the martyrs who have laid down their lives for saving the motherland. Portraying the living is fundamentally different from portraying the dead. A living person is portrayed for his achievements and he is here to see it and live it. An artist could be celebratory in mood while painting such portraits. But in the case of portraying a dead person, who is a martyr and has sacrificed his life for the sake of the security of the country, the attitude of the artist differs considerably.

Here the artist cannot be out of her praise, pride, glorification of the dead and above all the guilt for leaving him before death. When a martyr is born (and the person is dead), we all take share in the ‘birth’ of him

And what could be the best metaphor for a guilt ridden face? Or what could be the face of a person who is already in repentance and craving for a new life? What kind of face a person would like to show the world, which has found him guilty? What is the kind of face one wants when he/she transports him/herself to the realm of enlightened life? A mask. Aarti Zaveri reaches this conclusion after several experiments with other images and metaphors. Mask as a metaphor would help the human beings not only to hide the inner turmoil but also would help him/her to show a new personality to the world; a completely transformed personality. For the artist, the present face that one carries is actually the mask, not the other way round. Once the person removes that mask and wears a new one, a decorated and serene one, a new personality is created. It is not a falsified presentation, on the contrary, it is a way of shedding the predominant human characteristics like greed and gluttony shown and seen through the actual faces. Once the mask is worn, or in other words, when the person is transformed, the mask becomes the new face and slowly it becomes the natural face of the person. Aarti Zaveri believes in the birth of a new man/woman through this series on mask.

Aarti Zaveri uses bright colours in her paintings. These bright colours, also a counter thesis to the sober colours used in the official portraits, celebrate life and its fully glory and possibility devoid of guilt. The image of mask or the metaphor of mask is done with a lot of deliberation and discretion; each mask is decorated as if they were the representation of a God or a high priest. These decorations give a painterly feel to the masks while they get the visual embellishments.

In her point of view, each set of mask, a society in other words, could create a constellation, a new planar system, where things are radically different from the current state of affairs here on the earth. The new constellations are bright and filled with bliss, where the masks float like ethereal beings or great planets. However, Aarti Zaveri is not just spiritual in her approach. Her intentions to critique the situation not only as an artist but also as a woman, come forth once in a while when she creates the metaphor of cages in which the masks are neatly kept as if they were birds in captivity waiting to be released.

Aarti Zaveri’s works, taken out of the interpretational frames and seen purely as visual forms, belong to a sort of figurative expressionism, which could at times verge into the point of abstraction. She uses colours with some kind of boldness and never shies away from being experimental. Formal experiments are done by trying out surrealist fantasies and kinaesthetic renderings. Aarti Zaveri invites the viewer into her works and once they are inside the paintings, they cannot come out of them without wearing a mask of change.

JohnyML New Delhi July 2011