Thaindian News

New Delhi, Nov 25 (IANS) India’s pilgrimage trails provide sustenance to well-known Spanish conceptual artist and filmmaker Frederic Amat’s multimedia art.

Amat, who hails from Barcelona, is in India with a booty of 100 art works and an art documentary that chronicles two of his Indian odysseys in 2000 and 2003 with abstract impressions of Varanasi, Rajasthan, New Delhi, Mumbai and South India.

His exposition, “Papers de l’ India” or Papers of India, curated by Alka Pande, has opened at the Spanish Cultural Institute in the capital.

“I travelled for months on my first visit to India in the winter of 2000. Three years later, I returned to visit South India purely out of inclination towards India. During my stay in Varanasi I walked each day - the same time at 6.37 p.m. - to look at the power cables on electric posts stretching out in a mass of grotesque and tangled mass
etched in black and white. It was like a strange calligraphy against the white sky representing enigma, images and transformation,” Amat told IANS.

“The wires reminded me of the Ganges - its meandering flow like the curly mane of Lord Shiva - from which the river is said to flow,” the artist said.

The series, “River of Ink”, consists of improvisational photographs touched manually with ink and brush strokes.

A series of umbrellas, “Suite Umbrellas”, painted during 2000-2002, uses thick black pigments and patches of bright acrylic colours to convey the mystic and traditional flavour of the city.

Amat visited Rajasthan and recorded his impressions of the desert state in small format expressionist images, using a variety of objects like fabrics, threads, scraps of metals, used objects and paints.

Jodhpur with its royal heritage reminded Amat of flowers.

“As an artist the best way to understand a journey is through my own work. To paint is to digest - it is what we eat with our eyes. Between 2000 and 2003, I spent five months travelling through India,” Amat said. In the course of his journeys, Amat drew and shot hundreds of images of India, filling sketchbooks, which later became the master-prints
for his larger frames.

In 2003, Amat returned to his “karma bhoomi” - as he likes to describe India - once more. This time he went south to the backwaters of Kerala with his movie camera.

“I made a three-minute film, ‘Backwaters’. It was like painting the lush backwaters and lakes in the state with my camera from a rice barge that was my home for a few travelling days,” Amat said.

He said “most of the shots in the evening when the channels resembled rivers of ink and the vegetation along its bank rose like black silhouettes”.

The artist, an accomplished illustrator, collaborated with Malayalam novelist-poet Anita Nair for her book, “Magical Indian Myths” for which he drew his impressions of India and contributed a pictorial travelogue on India in the first Spanish edition of the Granta.

“As a Westerner, India and the Orient gives me the opportunity to understand myself. The culture of this country is so spiritual,” Amat said.

The artist has been inspired by Sufism, which recurs in his frames in motifs of the “magical dervish circles” on pristine white background.

The artist, who directs opera and theatre sets, has made several movies, including the acclaimed “Viaje a la luna (A trip to the moon)”, the only film script written by one of Spain’s greatest literary figures, Federico Garcia Lorca, in 1929, he said.

Amat turned the script - a comment on the influence of early 20th century surrealism in cinema - into a movie in 1998.

(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in)