Dear Friends, Over the next three days, at 5 pm, I will conduct curated walks through the Goan art group exhibition that is part of the ongoing Serendipity Arts Festival. The venue is Bento Miguel building, near the old Post Office, and just next to the foot of the old Patto Bridge. All are welcome and I hope to see you there. If you could spread notice of these walks to anyone else who might be interested, that would be greatly appreciated. Please do come and see the marvellous efforts of over 30 brilliant artists, spread across three generations currently working in Goa.
My curatorial note is below ----> ---------- NOW YOU SEE IT: The Invisible River of Konkani Surrealism From the very beginning, the artists of Goa have contributed disproportionately to what is now recognized as modern and contemporary Indian art. The very first classes at JJ School of Art in colonial Bombay of the 1860s were stacked with students from the Estado da India. In 1870, its director boasted about the extraordinary proficiency of his “Goanese” pupils. Later, its star “native” faculty member was Antonio Xavier Trindade, who was also the first Indian to win the gold medal at the annual competition of the Bombay Art Society. That prizewinning 1920 painting can be viewed just a short walk away from this exhibition, in the public gallery space of the Fundação Oriente. ‘Flora’ is a landmark achievement not only because a son of the Konkan painted so marvellously in the European style, but because of the audacity and panache with which the subject is portrayed. This is the artists own wife, depicted in a manner quite unlike what you might imagine an Indian woman of the times might consider suitable. Similar paradigm-shifting and genre-bending has remained a hallmark of the art and artists of Goa, from the spectacularly beautiful sari-clad Madonnas of Angelo da Fonseca to the considered iconoclasm of Francis Newton Souza and Vasudeo Gaitonde in the Progressive Artist’s Movement of the late 1940s and early 1950s. But even as these geniuses emerged one after another from the cultural milieu of this tiny riparian sliver of the Konkan coastline, their powerful bonds and relationships to each other, and to the complex many-layered culture of their homeland has remained obscured, and barely acknowledged. Their collective profound influence on the supremely skilled artists who have continued to rise unstoppably from Goa is even less understood, and often flatly denied. Now You See It: The Invisible River of Konkani Surrealism is a collaborative effort, and collective labour of love, that makes a compelling argument for the Goan artistic world view. About the highly evolved built heritage of the state, the late architectural historian (who was partly responsible for bringing the Trindade archive to rest in Fontainhas) Paulo Varela Gomes wrote, it is not “the end-result of a compromise, but the affirmative artistic statement of a cultural position.” This certainly applies to the artworks in this wide-ranging exhibition showcasing the output of three generations of marvellous practicioners, who together make the case for Konkani Surrealism. Precisely ten years ago, Ranjit Hoskote first made a sophisticated case for the art and artists of Goa to be recognized as a coherent whole, an “invisible river” which “has fed into the wider flow of Indian art but has not always been recognised as so doing.” With their dedicated efforts in ‘Now You See It’, the artists of Goa have insisted on that acknowledgement, which can no longer be denied.
