valentin hauri

Visual poetry

The exchange of art residencies between Bangalore and the Swiss city of Aarau already has some history, but only Valentin Hauri has transformed it into a full and interactive experience of the place --- aesthetic as much as human. He approached India as a conceptual artist using the orientation's seemingly cool means to reach the tangible and the personal intimately. As a minimalist, he aimed at touching the essential and the precious.

Perhaps, being new to the country made him respond to it with all his senses and sensitivity. In the resulting work this translated into simultaneity of planes, media and evocations adding to a complex but simply interconnected whole.

At first glance, a visitor to Hauri's exhibition (KCP, Novem ber 26 to 30) could have been be wildered finding just a vast, low table, leaflets and books while high under the ceiling hung a row of metal plates with words in English, French and German painted in a small local studio and resembling street corner boards of travel agents or such. The title of the show, however, "Full Moon Portrait of a Boy" in reference to a painting by K. Venkatappa, made one read the inscriptions more carefully.

Their multilingual quotations from poets and hints at In dian as well as western imagery, began to sound like signals of feelings and thoughts where the refined drew on the actual and the prosaic. The artist's specific sensibility could bond here with the quintessentially Indian lyricism dormant in the rough and the obvious. The very mix of languages, too, came from the Swiss reality enhanced by Hauri's presence in a new, yet more ethnically hybrid city.

"The Painted Chariot" which could be found among the papers on the table, reproduces the plates among an elaborated version of his own poetry conjured mainly from seminal words by other poets which turned into a s if stimulating material on par with visual imagery from art and ordinary life.

Going through the brochures about Switzerland, catalogues and volumes on art, one found files with Hauri's drawings in pencil and brush done in the last few months. The close contact evinced by the smallish, almost always entirely abstract works let one intuit an intensity conveyed by the delicate reduction of form. Its attunement and clarity capture mere traces of impressions, hues and linear shapes yet encapsulate what is most vital, thus making it pervasive and strong. Somewhere between the translucent wash and the sparing but nerve-loaded stroke one felt the atmosphere as absorbed by the artist.

The reproductions of Hauri's earlier paintings revealed how much his current work belongs to those. Still, certain colour and form emphases with their expressiveness could have been in- spired only by this environment. Sitting with other viewers on stools around the table and taking the books into one's hand generated a dynamism and mood thanks to which one be-came palpably involved in the work, in the artist's personal circumstance to eventually experience as though the white space between the flat spread of the materials and the metal plates far above were filling with the poetry of the paintings and the words.

Marta Jakimowicz, Deccan Herald, Monday, December 1, 2003