Beyond photography by Gargi Gupta

Source: Business Standard

Back from a successful solo show in Rome, Nikhil Bhandari is raring to take on Indian art lovers with his abstract prints.

Nikhil Shamsher Bhandari's works are photographs, but most viewers — in India at least — will not recognise them as such. Unlike conventional "documentary" photographs which hold a mirror to reality, Bhandari's large prints are abstracts, patterns of pure colour, shapes and planes of light and shadow.

You can discern forms in some — a nude female (in many), a pigeon, a dining room, the Rajasthani block print of a bed-cover — but the elements all come together and flow into one another in a way that is almost dream-like.

"What I do is the inverse of established photography, where the result is habitual ‘photograph'. I use photography as a medium. Just as a you use alphabets and words, just like Pandit Jasraj uses raga and laya, or a painter canvas, brush and paint, I paint with ‘light'," says the artist, just back from a very successful solo show, "Form Beyond Eros", at Rome's C02 gallery.

"Eighteen of the 36 works on show were sold," Bhandari says, which is apparently quite unprecedented given that the gallery norm for exhibitions by Asian artists is about four works sold.

If one detects a hint of exultation in Bhandari, then one gets the feeling during the course of a long, involved interview, that the encouraging sales only half explain it.

Rather, Bhandari's happy because he now has the stamp of market approbation on his chosen mode of expression, something this JJ School of Art pass-out has come to after years of trying out various things — painting, sculpture, "conventional" photography, first news, then advertising and later fashion catalogues in Milan, Vienna and Berlin.

Training under Andreas Bitesnich, who also opened the doors of production houses which handled the catalogues business (the fact that he charged about one-tenth of what European photographers with similar skills did must have helped), the experience taught Bhandari "how to look at fashion, the human body, especially nudes".

It was also in Europe, visiting an exhibition on photo techniques at Arles that Bhandari "for the first time, came face to face with holographic systems", of combining images to capture the state of flux of everything around us, and especially the "fluidity of human form".

What Bhandari does is project images that he's shot — mostly of Rajasthan, where he's been living for the past few years, and whose buildings and topography, especially their vivid colours, seem to inspire him endlessly — on to a form: a nude model, fruits on a table top, flowers, architecture, machinery… anything.

The model moves, the camera moves, creating interesting reflections against the strategically-placed lights on a mirror and which Bhandari captures in a frame, giving it long exposure time, exposing the film twice or multiply, depending on the effect he wants.

And it's not random; given his long experience in almost every genre of photography, Bhandari says he has as much control on the results as a painter who mixes colour on a palette to come up with the exact hue he wants. Blown up on cotton paper in huge sizes — anywhere from 1mx0.67m to 2mx1.5m — the effects are hypnotic.

There are only a handful of artists the world over who do such experiments with photography — Bhandari counts Michael Ackerman, Paolo Pellegrin and Arno Minkinnen as his gurus — and none in India. No wonder he had difficulty getting Indian galleries to show him.

But the Rome triumphs have opened a lot of doors — he's already sold four in the three weeks or so he's come back (Rs 1.5 lakh for the large, and Rs 70,000 for the small works).

Other galleries abroad — the Museo Nuova Era in Bari in southern Italy, The Nobel Sage, London — and in India have included them on their list. Akar Prakar will be hosting a huge exhibition of prints and sculptures (including some photo installations) in Kolkata in August.

Now will Indian art-lovers be as receptive as the ones in Rome?