The Newar painter Shyam Lal Shrestha in a key painting from the Expression 2000 exhibition currently on view at the Siddhartha Art Gallery depicts a similar scene-a street or square full of anonymous figures standing forth or milling round oblivious of each other's presence. Perhaps they are Newars in the native dress, but the faces fade, the forms are overlaid by strokes of colour; the near facelessness masked by the beauty of multicoloured layering.
The artist, though admitting the city's anomie, stresses beauty, and, in the larger context of his work, the face of his culture is maintained in paintings that characterise ceremony and situation that are explicitly traditional Newar. Within these sensually rendered forms colour is brought forth as it is in life. Sometimes integral to the emerging work and elsewhere taking on the predominance of abstraction, strokes of colour overlay or manifest emotions evoked by the scene.
Modernity in the artist's bold use of colour and accentuation of the brush stroke confirm the vibrancy within the Newar culture itself-as if colour and stroke abstracted were born of locality and tradition.
In this larger context, the isolated moment of anomie sensed is no more than the mist of morning not yet burnt off, ready to reveal a cohesive culture and people held to the ever-present morning of their world. The many richly textured paintings linked to Newar life and ceremony attest to this ongoing and centuries-old milieu. The poet raises a warning; the artist anticipates it. Within the forms of modernity, and despite the ever-present and encroaching larger world, the traditional and the local can achieve a viable mode of expression. Where the balance holds, abstraction's energising force brings forth the inbred power of Newar culture-for the outsider, the merely picturesque takes on a likelihood of presence, not a static eccentricity, but a living grace.
Where abstraction dominates, the sustaining rituals of the local are lost in the interplay of colour and stroke and what remains of the cohesiveness of its cultural gestures is the patterned regularity of brushstroke in the painter's hand.
Where colour dominates, a saturate brilliance, not unlike the multicoloured lure the poet decries as a sign of an indigenous culture's decline, masks in its celebration of the abstract the loss of the indigenous. Shyam Lal Shrestha's Expression 2000 exhibits the sustaining power of the local and the dynamism of the abstract-his defining work is where these forces generate a unity of form.
Expression 2000
by Shyam Lal Shrestha
Siddhartha Art Gallery, Baber Mahal Revisited
19 September-3 October
