The Descent of Man

We were never meant to know the truth behind the final work made by Jonas, the protagonist in Albert Camus’ story The Artist at Work. Mired by a string of successive achievements, and reluctantly in possession of an ever-expanding circle of invasive onlookers, Jonas finds himself shorn of the privacy he urgently needs in order to paint. Finally isolating himself in a dark, dingy attic, desperate to escape the cruelty of his omniscient audience, he starts to work on a canvas again. Deciding it is finished, he descends a ladder to return to the world, then faints. Camus eventually reveals to the reader the content of this masterpiece— a blank canvas with a word that reads uncertainly in translation as either ‘solidary’ or ‘solitary’. This contingent ambiguity links the story to the overarching title of the 1957 collection in which it had been anthologised, Exile and the Kingdom, and, in a curious, backhanded, circuitous way, serves as an excellent metaphor for Visions of Interiority: Interrogating the Male Body, the ongoing retrospective at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) that marks 50 years of Rameshwar Broota’s artistic practice.

14 November 2014