CHANCON Chance-Consciousness Art new direction in art

Indian art now

After centuries of stunted growth and ignorance Indian art now is looking for its modern metaphor of contemporary expression. Indian artists specially the young Indian artists are bit confused and born in the age of cyber net look to West for inspiration and blatant lifting of ideas. Art now in India has to forgo this lack of confidence--a result of the inferiority bred by colonization of India by the White racialists--Portugal and Britain.

The dilemma is twofold.

I. How not get buried under the weight of so much art in temples, myth, religion, folk art and expression, iconography going back to Mohenjo Daro and highly developed and articulate multiple cultural identities of various regions of India.

II. To not get swept by the West. I understand most critics in West use West as synonymous to global or international. How wrong they are and also our artists in India who regard copying the West is to be modern and contemporary artistic expression.

To get out of artistic dilemma is needed faith in our own cultural, folk, regional, religious identities and to launch new creative forays in art that will be both Indian and contemporary. we can thus have art of India becoming at the sme time international

A book on Indian art-Mona Lisa does not smile anymore

A fresh look at Indian art

Gandhi acrylic on canvas 2010, 58"X78" Viktor Vijay

Unforming the Formed acrylic on canvas 2010, 58"X78" Viktor Vijay

New direction in Indian contemporary art

Viktor Vijay's book Mona Lisa does not smile anymore (ISBN 9788184655124) published by Studio Vasant Delhi (Mobile 9818301496)

"To paint appearences is to miss out on inner kernel of the world. Increasingly the commercial industrial thought and technologies have spilled over into art domain ; replication of apparent with digital manipulation and, camera use has taken over from the inner creative well of humanity. The technologies are not the blood and marrow of humanity, instead the direction, freedom, the vision from within are the structure of human enterprise. To abnegate the world of stock appearences we need to have inner spiritual cues. Not the knowledge of the external but the saturating unitary experience of the inner. In my art I work with chance and attempted negation of conscious, well planned, control of the artistic expression. I surrender so the Light will shine on creativity. The joining of Chance as a higher order of things with a consciousness that comes from within and transforms our ‘seeing’ is what my art is about. I call it Chance-Consciousness Art or Chancon

The second part of the book is called Mona Lisa does not smile anymore. The painting is a symbol of the so called Renaissance society. In the very time Vaso da Gama journeyed to Indiabegan the story of pain, sufferings and subjugation of Indians—the first experience of Colonialism. The rest of the world would suffer no less—slave trade, forced conversions, atrocities and Inquistion in the name of religion. It was a false Reniassance which caused untold suffering to people all over the world and the Mona Lisa’s smile was not shared by subjugated races. Here I deal with Indian art that was called inferior by Western colonists. This was the ruse of the colonizers to dub everything from the subjugated people to be inferior. The ancient Hinduism has a far deeper humanitarian philosophy at its back and the art created therefrom had a much bigger aestetics root in Humanism. I have argued that the Greco-Roman art that the West inherited was founded on arrogance, war and slavery and was therefore inferior as humanizing instrument. Indian art is poetic, spiritual, secular and with a great wisdom and philosophy behind it. I have toched upon the narrtives of travellers from Europe and China. While the former are very dismissive of Indian, art, religion, culture and people the Chinese on the other were highly respectful and record the flourishing India more truthfully. Chinese travelled as piligrim and seekers of Eternal truth in the religion of Gautam Buddha.

It is important to place all art in the context of humanity and Indian art aquits itself very well where as the same can not be said of West. Hinduism never demonized another faith and Indians had a placid curosity and respect for other faiths"

excerpts from Mona Lisa does not smile anymore

Viktor vijay confluence of India and West

Taureau et de la lumière

42"X34"

acrylic on canvas

Artist Viktor Vijay

Status Available

Cosmic Window

58"X78"

acrylic on canvas

Artist Viktor Vijay

Fresh Nuances in Symbolic expressionism Viktor Vijay Kumar an artist was lost to India for nearly a decade. This time he spent to sieve the artistic fine sand of contemporary Europe. He was not confined to Western Europe in his food, sleep, paint, love, dance and travel. Equally important to him were the emergent artistic ethos of Eastern Europe. He found new taste of food, new vocabulary of language different gestures in everyday interactions, Mountain landscapes of Tatras, Carpathians, Alps and Taurus. Rivers and seas like Danube, Rhine, Mur, Black Sea, Mediterranean, Adriatic and Baltic Sea and ofcourse friendship with some of the finest of creative artists in these lands. He did not learn nor did he try to seek inspiration in the art of Europe but he freed himself of the fear. Fear to use colours, fear to use materials fear to fear what would emerge from his soul. He learnt about the roots of expressionism. Artists who built their lives sharing one loaf of bread among eight members of family, or worked in factories melting iron but still painting what emerged from the restive memories of II War. He heard stories of atrocities that scarred the psyche of the emergent artists. He discovered that human experience shapes the expression of an artist. He understood meaning of nihilism but he found sweet song of hope in the warm love in which these friends soaked him. There he learnt about pain and the human and artist’s ability to transmute it into morning song of a cuckoo. For he knew of Satish Gujral who after spending time with the great Diego Rivera painted his most powerful partition paintings in blacks and greys; he also knew of Hussain whose Bihar famine works still haunt us; he knew of Krishan Khanna who portrayed the pain of bandwalas while they regaled the marriage parties. Above all Vijay knew his own pain which he hid from the world right from his childhood.However due to twist of faith it was his maternal grand parents who brought him up. He learnt that to live with the memory of pain is to escape life and so he plunged headlong into the resurgent waves of creativity. The collective painful memories of Europe and its artists helped him to come to terms with his own inner pain. Thus was born a new Vijay who used his creativity to arrive at the fountain of innate energy. He painted with vehemence for one year (2006) in India and emerged his new works titled Energy. He calls it the energy of the cosmos, of humans, of Nature and of India. He reaffirms faith in humanity’s ability to radiate light and life. And this is what counts in the final call for humans.Viktor Vijay uses free strokes of brush and quite often drip and splash a la Jackson Pollock but beyond that his symbolism is rooted in Indian ethos. He is a symbolist in the way he uses colours. The use of black is usually accentuated by a dab of pure white. He builds his symbolism from the recesses of his own soul. His Shiva is monumental and nearly three-dimensional but is not the usual phallic form. It is more like a primitive human form. His brighter colours are enveloped by the dominant blacks and greys. But these bright oranges, yellows and crimsons wage a war against the blacks and greys. Light is symbolically at war with darkness. It is this desire of the light to force itself out of the prison of the black and darkness is what makes Vijay’s ‘Energy’ series works so powerful and different. Energy underlies all existent. The cosmos creates and recreates energy, the society and nations grow on sustained energy, and individuals discover their own evolution into higher realms through energy. Energy catalyses new dimensions of being. In Indian thought system cosmic energy emanates from the infinite—the anhad. S.H. Raza has used bindu and tantric geometricism to express energy. Vijay combines gestural actions with somnambulant flat colour surfaces to give vent to action and stasis, energy and containment, visual sound and tranquillity. He uses variant non-linear elements around exploding fields to suggest the channelling of the clamouring, resurgent energy. He splashes colour with a vehemence of physical energy that is symbolic of his artistic expression. He uses a visual vocabulary suggestive of unleashing of volcanic eruptions or the unlocking of colourful exuberant joyous energy of the seasons. Vijay’s artistic credo itself is symbolic of his art— O heaven give me the brush of long stemmed red rose and the colours of eternal rainbow so I can paint the laughter of the child that stamps life with innocence, the flowers that strive for fragrant beauty, the divine warm sunshine that matures the grapes and the speck of dust that transcends to infinity. No doubt in the emergent artscape of India he is an artist to watch for his art is structured on sublimated pain and the desire of humanity to be in light and sunshine across globe.

sacramental landscape

Mohenjo Daro Dancing Girl

The 'Dancing Girl' bronze sculpture from Mohanjo Daro is the earliest example of metal sculpture that India has.The pouting sensuous lips, the feet akimbo and arm held at slender waist, an ethereal dance she enacts. She is the finest from the pre-history of Indian subcontinent. The artist of the time had intuitive feel for charm, rhythm, flow and musicality of expression. Her thick coil of hair, her bangled arm, the necklace sitting on her bosom add charm to her proud nude form.She was a proud model for the artist who cast her in lost wax method about 4500 years from present.
One is mesmerized by this 10.8 cm long figurine and kudos to the unknown maestro who made her timeless through his art.