'OUT HERE AND NOW' a solo show in 2011-2012
LIVING TO TELL A TALE BY JOHNY ML
For Balbir Krishan, the present solo show titled, ‘Out Here and Now’ meaningfully dedicated to late Bhupen Khakhar is a bold way of coming out of the closet in which he has been closed himself for the last three decades. In this new suite of paintings done in acrylic on printed canvases Balbir elaborates his views on homosexuality in a forthright manner, as if they were declarations of a person who had been hiding his own self behind the continuous portrayal of the relationship between heterosexual human beings. The printed canvases, on a closer look reveal a multitude of homo-erotic scenes where men are involved in various postures of love making. These images are not predominantly disturbing or disgusting as they function as a background or a sub-text for the artist and his main intention is the celebration of respectable homo-erotic relationships, in which he too is a part. Balbir does not portray himself in the paintings, instead he portrays his surrogate self in the form of a bold male along with a same sex partner who engage themselves in the acts of intimacy.
Hailing from Bagpat in Uttar Pradesh the saga of Balbir is quite touching. Balbir lost both the legs in a train accident in 1996. He was coming from Agra where he was pursuing his college studies in which fine arts was a dominant subject. At times, Balbir ruminates that he could have been different had his legs not been amputated after the tragic train accident. Also he thinks that he could have been different had he been enrolled in one of the fine arts colleges in India. But he never regrets for his sexual orientation. He knew from the very beginning that he was different. And it was quite taxing for him to understand why he was like that. He knew he liked men than women and also he knew that if he ever wanted to do something in life it was creating paintings. The gloomy days that followed the tragedy put him into a thinking mode and he wanted to express his own self through drawings and paintings that heralded, interestingly the heterosexual interests of any human being.
While negotiating with the fate that had befallen on him like a curse Balbir made attempts to negotiate with his own sexuality as well as his material needs. All of a sudden he realized that what he faced during his day to day life was a double handicap. On the one had he was physically handicap and on the other he was having a different sexual orientation. According to the artist he had to go through a series of self-negating acts both in his life and his art. He negated his handicap by adding up limbs to the images of the destitute children that he was painting at that point of time. The limbs appeared in them as prosthetic limbs as if they were attached to the body. Balbir remembers that he always wanted to do human figures, both male and female but at the same time he knew that he was absconding from his real feelings and needs. This period of self negation took him even to do abstract drawings.
The lack of materials and the lack of financial support made Balbir to think about alternative mediums and he suddenly recognized the fact that ball point pen on cartridge paper was working well for him. He chose to work in this medium mainly because it was cheap and the intimate size and feel of the medium helped him to sit upright on his bed or chair and work continuously. Balbir works like a miniature artist, building each part of the paper with innumerable strokes and dots with ballpoint pen of different colors. Hence, a medium that became handy for him thanks to material wants now proved to be a suitable one for his creative thinking. Still Balbir felt the lack in his paintings. He intensely craved for human touch and presence. But living in a very traditional and conventional family with religious and binding social beliefs it was difficult for him to launch himself to the images that he really wanted to paint.
Going through the works done during the first phase of this decade, we could see Balbir once again trying to hold his internal passion for male human figures interacting with the same sex group being camouflaged and hoodwinked by the heterosexual images. Somewhere, Balbir attributes avian nature to his protagonists by replacing their heads with the heads of the birds. His focus is on their bodies, full, voluptuous and sensitive, but at the same time giving support and protection to each other. They are not in a violent relationship; they mutually support as we see many of the male figures are seen lying on the lap of the female figure. The avian face and head in a way replaces the urge for creative phallic images by Balbir. However, one could see how Balbir as an artist as well as a human being craves for human love and sympathy. In all these paintings what Balbir does is making his intentions for human company obvious. But there too the danger was that anyone could have taken him for a male who was demanding the presence of a female.
Death, illness, destitution and depression used to be a persistent thinking for a long time in Balbir’s pictorial imagination not because he was handicapped on two different counts. He has always been ready to fight his physical handicap and he proved his ability to do so by accepting prosthetic legs and learned to lead a normal life. But he accepted his failure as a human being because he was always betraying his own feelings. His works were rather appearing before himself not as pieces of sincere expressions instead for him, they looked like veils that covered his original thinking and intentions. Fighting for his sexual rights became increasingly urgent and he could not find right ways to vent his emotions. It was during this period of conflict that he chanced upon the works of Late Bhupen Khakhar. This particular work titled ‘Yayati’ by the late artist caught his attention and he realized how this artist very boldly interpreted the mythological narrative in a way that suited to his sexual orientation. The exchange of maleness from son to father was treated by the artist as a homo-erotic exchange which was at once an act or rebellion and declaration of freedom.
Inspired by Bhupen’s painting Balbir decided to bring his original thinking in pictorial terms without anything to hold him back. Each time he felt that he was deceiving himself by painting surrogate figures and now he felt an unprecedented freedom and this present suite of works proves that how he enjoys himself to tell the world that he is perfectly in tune with his own self and he no longer wants to hold anything away from the purview of the society. If the society is judgmental, Balbir feels that it should be left to have its own ways. He cannot live anymore according to the diktats of it. In Balbir, this coming out happens in a double edged way; on the one hand he tells the people around him that he is not the person whom they think him to be, on the other, he tells himself that he is no longer the same person who used to camouflage his feelings through surrogate images.
Balbir’s works are not overtly political; but the present set of paintings is overtly erotic. Being political and being erotic are two different issues till they are brought in as tributaries to the discourse of gender and sexual preferences. By referring to the already existing and democratically available homo erotic pictures in the internet and placing them as the major backdrop for the male nude protagonists, Balbir makes a serious declaration before the world that despite his physical handicap he is going to be there very much in the midst of life, enjoying it fully without remorse or regret, and he is going to live the life of an artist who loves the world. This declaration that comes in the form of a series of paintings is political because it encapsulates the grit and guts of a person who is physically handicapped, but has taken all the courage to come out and tell the world that he is a gay.
Today Balbir’s personal stance has become a political stance for him as he has gained the courage to tell his people and the village where he lives that he is different but not different from anyone of the human beings around him. He wants to be with human beings and he declares that the ability to touch the other is not about having sex with the same sex or the opposite one. It is all about caring and understanding. And Balbir is lucky enough to have a companion and partner in his life who takes care of Balbir’s emotional as well as intellectual needs. Balbir has been keeping to himself for long time. But with the advent of the social networking sites, he could connect to like-minded people and the non-governmental organizations working in the field of alternative sexuality. Balbir Krishan’s paintings also show the confidence that an artist as well as a human being that he has gained off late.
Johny M L
New Delhi
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| balbir krishan/this is not dark life |
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| balbir krishan/this is not dark life |
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| balbir krishan/this is not dark life |
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| balbir krishan/this is not dark life |
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| balbir krishan/this is not dark life |
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| balbir krishan/this is not dark life |
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| balbir krishan/this is not dark life |
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| balbir krishan/this is not dark life |
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| balbir krishan/this is not dark life |
