Bari Kumar Essay
#23 Michael Rosenfeld (Visiting Painting)
#24 Bari Kumar (Response Painting)
When I was first approached with this project, I was apprehensive about participating in it – not because of the curatorial stance, but of my own art making process. I work in a solitary space reflecting and inquiring into my sense of being; my truth! I am free to be as literal or ambiguous as I desire to express. With this project, I have to interpret and represent the work of someone else. I also realize that as a painter I have to constantly push the boundaries of my comfort zone. To react and interact with others’ work is a dialog I seek often. So, I had to commit and just do it.
My initial response upon receiving the painting was to be just observant. To listen with my eyes to the imagery portrayed without trying to analyze it. I spent the first couple of days doing just that. The painting given to me looked like the interior of intestines with soft pink fleshy folds. Then I see that it is a close up of cupped palms of two hands, cradling a tiny egg, which has cracked open to the birth of an exotic blue toned lizard like creature. There was a reference to safety, danger, comforting, fragility, and by the composition of the image, a sense of scale. On the sides of the canvas were the words, “Square of Deceit.”
Are the hands the bed of comfort for the tiny creature or can it be crushed by merely closing them ? Is the creature as safe and innocent as it is portrayed by its tiny size or is it a monster in making? The words on the sides of the painting allude to the contradictions of one’s perceptions of the imagery that nothing is what it seems.
I wanted to have a sense of the color that reflected the previous work. Like the pinkish folds of the palms, As I began to paint, I opted to change the concept over and over. A sense of inside/outside to create a feeling of safety and danger. Light and dark was another idea to implement the contrasts. The fingers from the previous painting manifested themselves in my work as a swastika form, a symbol of good luck and that of inhumane repression. The blue color of the hands and its surrounding space is reflective of the exotic creature from the egg. I wanted to play off the lizard like creature by painting the salamanders on the interior wall. They seem to be locked in some sort of a mating ritual or in the midst of a fight or the act of climbing over the other to get to a safer place. The wrinkles on their skin was like the folds of the fingers of the swastika. The soft, delicate fragility of the flesh belies the dangers that they may possess. The small white square note reiterates the squares within the square elements of the painting.