How Ranjit Hoskote’s Essays on Gieve Patel Reflect the Pitfalls of Overanalysing Art and Straying from its Core.

Published : Jun 26, 2024 11:00 IST - 7 MINS READ You are looking at a painting, say Gieve Patel’s Crows With A Debris —two crows are pecking at the remains of an animal flattened and decapitated by the tyre of a car or bike; the tyre mark is embossed on the grey surface of the tarred road, the grooves of the tyre outlined in blood; there is a used condom in the foreground and a fence with broken barbed wire in the background. When we see the paintings of Patel’s wells, an exploration of his childhood at Nargol, Hoskote writes movingly of the paradox of looking at these paintings—“to look down is to look up and indeed, to look into a depth is to risk falling or being disoriented, losing oneself.” This poignant observation, even if it overstates an “attack of vertigo”, is padded by a peacocking, undoing this moment of repose: “It is a moment fraught with the potentiality of self-dissolution.” How fragile is this self that is dissolved by dizziness? In a sense, Patel’s art is what art critic Sebastian Smee calls “baroque”—to “transcend… programmatic dictates” by refusing to keep the viewer at a “chaste distance”. To look at Patel’s Crow With Egg-Shell, a crow precariously balancing an egg on its beak, and to see the egg as a “symbol of fertility” and the image as an “allegory of the imagination under threat from destructive forces”, is to see how art criticism can almost un-make the art itself. Hoskote notes that the painting based on an image Patel saw of football players, could be “read, perhaps quite persuasively, as homoerotic kinship”, only to swerve immediately and fixate, instead, on a more spiritual reading that interests him: “of exaltation, of communion, of intimate exchange transmuted into a sacred moment… perhaps, a martyred saint and his apostle?” To evade the most obvious, most potent affect of the image—desire—and to, instead, float possibilities of pithy spiritual insight is a tiresome tilt away from the image itself.