Notes to Nirmal

Drawing may be many a thing: a pictorial expression in its own right, an open mental process, the visualization of ideas, preliminary sketches, picture laboratory, narrative, dream, a journey…
To Nirmal Singh Dhunsi, drawing are all these things – and more: a daily chore executed in an atmosphere of testing, questioning, play and surprises; partly an intentional and partly an open and unpredictable “stream of visual consciousness” where he stages his own (and our) concepts of identity.

(For an artist) Nirmal has an enviable problem: an identity rooted in more cultures. I conceive this “problem” as an important part of his force as an artist. I.e. rather a strength and a resource than a problem. He has a larger map to orient himself according to than most others, - more points of reference, more codes.

What I see: Mickey Mouse, Indian cows and holy men, Campbell’s/Warhol’s soup cans, Ganesh the elephant god, Goofy, plastic bags, tins of bread spread and tandoori condiments, Duchamp’s urinals, picture frames, furniture, a portrait of Joseph Beuys (Warhol’s), more Indian gods (Shiva, Krishna?).

American cartoon characters, Indian religion and folklore, consumer goods of all sorts, references to Western high art - this is like a mental laboratory experiment: a systematic conflation of elements from Western an Oriental high and low culture in the test tube of drawing (caleidescope? Crystal ball?). A flying-floating dissolution where the elements constantly go into shifting liasons. Drawing to see – what will happen, what has happened.

What I see: the playful, investigating activity of a creative-reflecting man with great knowledge about Indian and Western visual culture in a broad range, and with a strong need to put himself in a state of… uncertainty, confusion? – with a desire to create something that disturbs his own balance? The picture as an eye opener: it offers us fresh view on things.

Is Mickey Mouse a hindu deity? Is Ganesh a cartoon character? (Traditionally Ganesh is depicted together with, and often riding on, a mouse – as a sign of humbleness.) Is it the common fate of the elephant god and the mouse man, that they exist in the human imagination? What happens when the two come together, exchange their knowledge and reveal, and perhaps liberate themselves from the hierarchies made by humans?

And I see a conspicious, conscious and varied “how” in these drawings: occasionally elegant, occasionally “clumsy”, occasionally indifferently careless, occasionally monumental, professionally confident, occasionally tenderly quiet, poetic. And always unpredictable, stimulating, open and… beautiful. The proximity and lightness of the drawings offer us a direct pictorial impulse which surprises.

The qualities specific to the picture: we see it, in an entity – and it affects us by what it shows and how it shows it. The picture has its own rhythm, its own temperature and weight, and its own order (its ”laws”). And it’s always difficult to tell what the picture is and what it does to us. Because it works in a different manner than the language we apply to describe it and to think about it. The picture’s fertile elusiveness to language.

Nirmal has confidence in the picture – in the picture’s ability to make opposites come together and demonstrate their mutually exclusive qualities. Here the opposites collide in sealed off surroundings – they intensify each other, create tension. Sometimes with a powerful yet mute explosion as a result. The picture’s explosion motor: furthering the process of cognition.

The picture maker’s desire for extension, expansion – that the picture should be larger than itself and knowing more than itself. Pictures are made from a basis of certain ideas, but their effects are to an extent inpredictable. The pictures surpass (and bypass) our senses.

Maya must be the goddess of the picture; not merely responsible for the seductive veil that the illusion of the senses has to offer, but also also for the liberating knowledge that may be extracted by the illusion.

Nirmal draws pictures within the pictures: picture frames with empty speech bubbles. What do they “say”? A lot!

Per Formo, January 2005