Important Notice

"Kallat's works record a continuing process of decay and growth. They simulate – through the piquant ambiguities of density and shadow – the effects of peeling and chipping, scratching and smudging, the spread of damp and moss. Kallat turns his picture surface into a wall: a public document on which private emotion finds purchase in teasing graffiti and impulsive doodles, memoranda jotted among patches of mouldy plaster" (Ranjit Hoskote, "Wall... "Kallat's works record a continuing process of decay and growth. They simulate – through the piquant ambiguities of density and shadow – the effects of peeling and chipping, scratching and smudging, the spread of damp and moss. Kallat turns his picture surface into a wall: a public document on which private emotion finds purchase in teasing graffiti and impulsive doodles, memoranda jotted among patches of mouldy plaster" (Ranjit Hoskote, "Wall Games, Dispersed Self-Portraits, Fantastic Journeys: Recent Paintings by Jitish Kallat", P.T.O., Gallery Chemould exhibition catalogue, 1997, unpaginated).

Like his self-portrait, which features at the upper left of the present lot, the lamp is a recurrent motif in Kallat's oeuvre. Symbolic of learning, enlightenment and renewal, the lamp in this work is diametrically opposed to the cultural decay and the impossibility of ‘illumination' that the artist communicates through his gritty technique and somber palette of blue and grey. Inscribing the phrase ‘eulogy to a lamp' more than once on the surface, Kallat intones that the age of letters and erudition has passed, though some, like the subject in this piece, may desperately hang on to its remnants. In today's metropolises, like Kallat's native Bombay, it has been replaced by fast-track technology and instant communication, fax machines and email, whose oft-garbled output is reflected in the blots and streaks that scar the surface. Ironically, and Kallat is well aware of this, art is one of the means that may be sought to reclaim enlightenment from the passage of time. As Hoskote puts it, Kallat's motifs and images propose a "mutiny of renewal" against "conditions of decay" (Ibid.).

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