Second Chance

SECOND CHANCE
By Dennis Matthews

One of the best shows in Chicago this summer was down the street from SAIC at the Chicago Cultural Center. It was free every single day and a rare show that illuminated the art of India whose artists don’t have many chances for exposure in America.

Ranbir Kaleka is one of the artists featured who will be back for a second chance in Chicago at the Spertus Museum at 610 South Michigan Avenue. (That’s about 5 Blocks south of the Art Institute and the Maclean Center).

It is always best to let the artist tell the story so…“The image may fall on the retina in an instant, but its reading takes place in time. Paintings usually reveal their details/nuances only gradually through many viewings. Our own state of mind at different moments reveal different relationships within a painting. A great painting (I am not referring to my work) is never depleted, it always holds back a little for your next visit.”.

Kaleka comes from the town of Patiala in the Punjab region of India. Born in 1953, Ranbir is one of the most strange and intriguing multimedia artists that I have recently been introduced to while living in Chicago. Turning the corner towards his sixtieth year, Kaleka has not lost pace with many younger artists working in the chasm between video and painting. He lives in New Delhi and London most of the year, and spends much time teaching and “keeping up with my deadlines.” as the artist has told me through exchanges of emails over the last few months.

Kaleka’s work is carefully painted images of people on canvas on which he projects video of the same people who slowly come to life. The video projections are of landscapes, trembling motions of the people as they begin to interact with each other or the story, and sometimes things like a white horse walk into the scene. To quote the artist, he says, “Technique and method are secondary, except in those cases where the 'process' of 'making/creating' a piece is the 'meaning' of the 'work' and the end product is just the ' by product'.”.

The video installations rely on our imaginations that what Kaleka is presenting could happen to us, for instance if you sit still on a stool for too long a horse may stop by. His work brings to mind other artists such as Bill Viola who presents slow videos that are clearly mixing animation with the still, ever-lasting image of a painting to bridge our expectations of art even further. On the website, AnotherSubContinent.com, Ranbir says of his work that, “When I do heads, I try to make the face particular and at the same time general. What I am trying to say is that every face, how so ever ordinary looking, has a distinctive character and mark of individuality. I try not to make an easily readable face as we are not easily definable. Looking at a face for a long time can be a humanizing experience, some aspect of the face invariably begins to look attractive…there are no ugly faces. There are two things I am doing while painting a face...I try not to fix it but bring ambiguity to it and then bring intensity to its presence.”.

This work will also be an permanent multi-media installation commissioned by Spertus Museum, Chicago. Tentative title, ‘Thus time passed and we got used to many things’. The new Spertus Museum is scheduled to open on November 30th, 2007.

The Spertus is a center for research of Jewish Studies that will soon open their new building. You’ve probably seen it walking to the Utrecht or down to the Field Museum, it’s the cracked, folded glass building being built on Michigan. For the most astute observer it was the site of an installation of Jewish “bad words” by Mel Bochner done in what he called “holocaust yellow” on black at his lecture last fall.

Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies

610 S. Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60605
FREE

all quotes courtesy of the artist and originally published on www.AnotherSubContinent.com
www.rkaleka.com