The Viewing Room is proud to present ‘four times five is twelve…’. Priti Vadakkath, first showcased her works in Bombay for The Viewing Room’s inaugural show ‘Prologue: pg. 0, Emergence’ got an outstanding response from critics and art lovers all over. She has since then created a niche for herself in the art world for her sensitive and delicate watercolours on children and has been showing her works extensively across India and the overseas. ‘four times five is twelve…’ is Priti’s first solo show which has been the pipeline for a long time now, and it is also one of the major shows of The Viewing Room this season.
Childhood and children have been a recurring theme in Priti Vadakkath’s recent works. The question of the identity of the child with respect to his or her environment, peers, and elders has been central in her thought process. Capturing and conveying their insecurities, identity confusion, loneliness, and simplicity stems from personal experiences. The children depicted in the paintings convey a disarming tenderness as also a deep disquiet, betraying bewilderment at the situation they find themselves in. As the process of defining themselves is incomplete, this flux and an apparent lack of consolidation of the identity are evident in their demeanour.
“Four times five is twelve, four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is – oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate.” is a quote from Lewis Carroll’s’ classic , Alice in Wonderland, where Alice experiences a series of queer and bizarre events, at the end of which she is not sure about her own identity anymore. Suspecting that she may have changed into someone else – and in a desperate bid to reaffirm her identity – she attempts to remember things she always used to know. In trying to recite the Multiplication tables - something she knew by heart – she is trying to reinforce her sense of self. As it turns out she is not able to get it right and subsequently, after referencing some more things she thought ‘Alice’ knew, she feels she may have turned into her friend Mabel after all.
The Childs ineptitude to navigate real-life situations and the lack of adaptability to displacement and dissonance is seen in most of Priti Vadakkath’s works. Social conditioning persuades them to confirm to the norm, and nascent independent thinking compels them to question all the answers. Around all this, the suffering is subtle, and implicit, leaving one wondering if the feeling of joy experienced at that time was only anecdotal.
The paintings do not necessarily ask for empathy, but more than that, by revealing some part of itself, it invites the viewer to remember the gaps in their own memories which may have long been shut out. Childhood itself has a certain mortality to it, as the child in question no longer exists except in the memory of the adult. It also exists in the recesses of the minds of those that did partake in that childhood experience. As we grow up the cached memories accumulate layers of meaning and these are revisited and referenced to make sense of the present.
In her paintings and charcoals the children are seen gazing out from the frame, and as we scrutinise their stares a transaction takes place and it is soon evident that what is being viewed is also viewing in return. They seek to recuperate in the viewer a sense of childhood-ness, not as the take-it-for-granted backdrop against which the drama of adult life is played out, but as the defining core around which life itself is explored and experienced. Camouflaged in nostalgia and alluding to finer affinities, it evokes qualities of Harper Lee’s famous Novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.
The eye is drawn to the simple and familiar, from which the mind is challenged to negotiate the complex and elusive.
The images are mostly sourced from her own family albums, reminiscent of Sally Mann’s ‘Immediate Family’. But in using them there is a deliberate surrender of fidelity, and an abstraction that lies in bleaching out all characteristics of the original and juxtaposition of images to convey the central idea behind the creation of the image. There is a sense of anxiety over what had been, or what is waiting to happen. The appearance of animals and birds as pictorial elements heighten the feeling of foreboding or equanimity, but, in either case holds off enough not to manipulate the viewer. Childhood then is not viewed as an untenable period but it has its crushing moments. Albert Camus said “The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way is without reason since it is inevitable.”
This is the redemption found in childhood, with all its preoccupations, invented memories, and residual traces of innocence, it holds out the hope that ‘Happiness is inevitable'.
