A Slip Of The Tongue: Thirty Years Of Sudhir Patwardhan's Drawings At Vadehra Art Gallery

It might be a matter of contention but a painting is a finished piece; a meditated, glossy, conclusive finality. Bracketed and closed-down. A sketch, however, is immediate. And a sketchbook, by that logic, is quite confessional. It is unguarded, undecided, unmeditated, as if speech was painting, thoughts were sketches. The raw mullings of an artist that come even before he's quite worked out what he thinks.

That is the premise of In Another Mode: Sudhir Patwardhan's Drawings 1970–2000, opening at Vadehra Art Gallery this weekend — and again, it is, pointedly, not a painting show. Two hundred drawings, spanning three decades from 1971 — and some rather tumultuous decades they were — when Patwardhan was still a medical student, are being shown for the first time as a body of work in their own right, curated by the art historian R. Siva Kumar.

"I never initially intended to show the sketches," Patwardhan admits. "They're part of what you continue to do on a daily basis." In a Freudian flair, he even calls them “slip of the tongue.” But, he says, "people who have been following my work have a right to the kind of insight the sketches give, apart from the paintings — because paintings are, in a sense, a considered kind of statement, while sketches are something that just happens." A painting, in other words, is testimony. A sketch is closer to symptom. An automatism without a thought.

The Man Of The World

In his essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ Baudelaire formulated a certain “man of the world.” By that he meant "a man of the whole world, a man who understands the world and the mysterious and legitimate reasons behind all its customs" as opposed to the artist who is "tied to his palette like a serf to the soil." The man of the world was "a lover of universal life," who entered the crowd "as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy," an "I" endlessly hungry for the "non-I" around it. Patwardhan's early sketches read like a Bombay dialect of exactly that appetite. A man submerged in the crowds while always at an artistic distance with it. An observer and a chronicler.

"In the early sketches there's a lot of drawing I did on the train," he recalls, "when travelling in a train or on the railway platform I used to draw people, or faces." Through the seventies it is commuters and strangers; through the eighties, as he moved out into the landscape, the frame widens; later still, it narrows again into the intimacies of the family — husband and wife, child and mother, child and father, grandparents. Different decades, different subjects, but always the same restless, uninvited closeness to other people's lives.

Drawing As Unconcealment

When you look at the figures in his sketches, for instance, a man sitting in a waiting room, hands clasped; a man taking off his vest in his room at the end of the day; or a woman seen from behind, combing her hair, a certain hyperrealist everydayness begins to seep in, until the truth of the human condition seems to envelop them all. There is something almost Heideggerian in the way Patwardhan describes this — art not as the making of an object but as a kind of unconcealment, truth allowed to step, briefly, into the open. Looking back at his own drawings from the seventies and eighties, he no longer recognises the hand that made them: "It seems like someone else's work. I can't recreate that in any way... it was done by someone in their twenties and thirties, now I'm in my seventies, so it was another person, basically." What survives that gap, he says, is a disposition rather than a style — "wanting to understand people, to empathise with different kinds of people and their problems." That disposition, he traces to two unlikely sources: a college circle reading Marx amid the strikes and farmers' protests of the seventies, and, alongside it, Sartre and Camus. "Even in the happiest of circumstances there is a certain loneliness that comes with being human," he says. "It's not only about exploitation — there's also this problem of being a human being. That always exists."

The Ethics Of Being Seen

Curiously, Patwardhan graduated in medicine from the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, in 1972, and practised as a radiologist in Thane from 1975 to 2005 — a double life he credits less with anatomical insight than with something harder to name. "When a patient comes to a doctor, he's in a subordinate position," he says. "A doctor can start using his power... rather than seeing the actual person with his own life, you reduce him to just his ailment." Painting the labouring body, he suggests, carries the same risk. "One has to empathise with the whole person... one must feel that this is a poor person, not just a body with a problem." He is candid about how easily this slips: "You tend to become a spokesman for someone... but I very soon realised that I can only be a kind of outsider looking at these people."

Riot, Unrolled

The most significant drawing in the show, titled Riot, made its way in almost by accident — pulled down from the attic of Patwardhan's old studio while searching for something else entirely, then restored "just in time" for the opening. Made in the aftermath of the 1992–93 Bombay riots, it belongs to what Siva Kumar, in his curatorial note, calls the "cathartic impulse" running through the larger drawings — works that, unlike the paintings, let their marks stay separate rather than fusing into a single skin.

The artist and curator will be in conversation at the gallery on Thursday, September 24, from 5 p.m., ahead of the public opening the following evening.