Dialogue presents Sudhakar Chippa’s new body of works made in collaboration with a 14-year-old boy from Nepal. Over the last three decades, Sudhakar has created artworks entirely by himself, from conception and ideation to execution using different techniques with wood and pigments in the isolated space of a studio. It is not surprising that such a practice reaches a point of saturation which limits the creative process for Sudhakar. A change in this status quo cannot take place only in the creative cerebral processes of imagination and expression but, it needs to involve the deeper subjective transformation of the practicing artist.
Sudhakar discovered the possibility of such a subjective transformation in the context of his art when he met by chance Ram Bahadur. Ram’s parents came to Hyderabad in search of work and they happened to settle at a place near Sudhakar’s studio. Ram started visiting Sudhakar’s studio and eventually started painting some details in his works. One day while observing Ram painting some details in his work, Sudhakar was marveled by the freedom and playfulness of his strokes. With each stroke, his imagination unveiled innocence, tenderness, and richness that originated from his village in Nepal. The spontaneity of Ram’s brush challenged the rigor of Sudhakar’s established ways of painting. This challenge offered him a new perspective on the possibilities of interactivity in making art and provided a conceptual edge to his present thematic engagement with the nature-culture dialectic.
For several years now Sudhakar has been making artworks responding to the changing urban cape of expanding Hyderabad and the loss of nature he is witnessing in his surroundings. Sudhakar’s studio is located on the periphery of Hyderabad, which is undergoing a drastic transformation due to the extensive real estate building activity. These disturbing changes have been represented through his works for quite a while. Ram’s hand added a sharper voice to it from a position outside the urban circumstances, but a position that is subjected to transformation and dislocation in the processes of progress and development. This is the paradoxical inevitability of modernization that transforms the landscapes into skylines.
Dialogue presents a point of meeting of two views, two voices and realities experienced differently. The architectural and geometric patterns Sudhakar made in the space of these paintings are dialectically complemented by the fluidity of Ram’s hand. The green fields of different hues made by Ram inspired Sudhakar to create map-like patterns by cutting out the surface of the wood. This combination of bright paint and the raw, textured, beige surface of wood produces a close connection with our experiences of seeing nature. Different from the mimetic images of landscape, or its transformation into an urban scene, these paintings are the perceptual negotiations between two ways of seeing the nature around. Thus, nature is presented here as a search for reality beyond the form of the landscape as a genre of representation.
This collaboration between Sudhakar and Ram is different because while Sudhakar is a trained and practicing artist, Ram does not have any art training. This makes it challenging a venture into an unknown zone of making art, to discover oneself newly in the process of collaboration. Perhaps, this exhibition titled Dialogue is an expression of that discovery, and a step towards a shared artistic journey, for both Ram and Sudhakar.