A line is a thing of many. It can carry a poem from a spark to its end, or be telling of age when gathered around cheekbones, or ponder a firm goodbye from a dear one holding onto the telephone. It can be nautical, locomotive and narcotic. It can connect and divide and while it wanders, it can guide.
In visual art, the line is typographical often resembling the transitive properties of writing wherein a direct relationship between the subject and object nurtures the space between them. This direction offers the action of mark-making in writing and drawing a physicality, an intimacy and a subjectivity that lay the basis for any and all symbolisms that will eventually emerge from the composition. The activity of the line is dense and unyielding; it doesn’t dissipate space inasmuch as it creates it, by carving out inflections in otherwise endless, blank matter. The weight of the composition is surely endured by its capricious language, sometimes private and secured, other times overt and raucous. Like writing, drawing relies on the individuality of each of its lines that assimilate into a larger story of some kind, even if the story is simply how the work effectively came to be. Additionally, drawing transmutes the basic tool of the line into different mediums and visual dialects giving rise to an instantaneous experience of the reality of something. As a result, time deflects. It unfolds in stages – from the formal encapsulation of the image’s own becoming, to the structural or non-structural narrative that frames its cognition, and the uncoiling of the associations we make within us. Existing in, of and as a vocabulary, the articulate line is in possession of temporality that enriches the context in which the line exists and behaves, greatly differing it from a stray mark on the wall.
For most Indian modernists, drawing was either a prolific mainstay or vigorous accompaniment of their art practice. A hallmark of Indian modernism is the motivation artists expressed to develop a cohesion in their visual languages and aesthetic sensibilities, so as to sustain the readability of their oeuvres as they aligned with their instruction, exposure, concerns, philosophical schools, and most importantly individual expressions rooted in invention. These gestures of drawing capture the primacy of the artist in a way that painting codifies that same distance, invoking feelings of time as much as timelessness and championing the vulnerabilities at the heart of human discourse through isolated figure studies and expressionistic mark-making as well as the reproductive potential of the image.
Time of the Line brings together a diverse body of drawings and etchings leaning into the figurative, calligraphic and landscape by artists M.F. Husain, Ram Kumar, Manjit Bawa, J. Swaminathan, A. Ramachandran and Paramjit Singh.
