| Akash Bhatt | ||||
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'Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind’ -Paul Auster The New York Trilogy
Just Walk takes us to diverse locations across the globe, inspired by a decade of trips to Kenya, Papua New Guinea, Gujarat, Cuba, New York, and also the streets with which the artist is most familiar, in North London and Leicester. ‘The place is secondary’, claims Bhatt, ‘Drawing is my first love’. Nevertheless he has travelled (and drawn) a lot, for an artist still only in his mid-thirties. Bhatt recalls sketching in the street in Meru -depicted in Pahali Kwa Babangu (My Father’s Place)-outside Nairobi. ‘My Dad insisted on me coming to Kenya-it was a kind of pilgrimage for him, and in retrospect for me too, to see the street where he was born and brought up’. Bhatt’s parents are Gujarati, having come to England from Kenya in the late 1960s and settled in Leicester.
It was perfectly natural for him therefore, on winning the BP travel award, to take himself to Fiji, where the political situation for the Indian minority carried echoes of that experienced by his own family in East Africa. The exhibition ‘Out of Fiji’ at the National Portrait gallery, was the result. His next trip took him to Papua New Guinea, and tribal festivals at Mount Hagen and Enga. He was able to draw and mix freely with the many tribespeoples of the Southern and Eastern Highlands, and it was here that he first sketched the painted faces which formed the kwikpiksa letta series of portraits. Subsequent travels have taken him to India, and on receiving the 2003 Villiers-David award, to Cuba, yet another society in a state of flux.
It is perhaps in Cuba, with its beautiful, dilapidated architecture, its crumbling facades, its wide boulevards full of predominantly pedestrian life, under an azure Caribbean sky, that Bhatt found the long horizontal format particularly apposite. These works invite one to amble along their length, marvelling at their depth in spite of the attenuated vertical dimension, telegraph poles and chimneys marking the way like sentinels. In one such, Mercado, inhabitants go about their daily business dwarfed by the fading arches of a formerly grand colonial building, the dim stalls of the market and the people within just visible. Fat pigeons sense their opportunity from the corrugated roofs, while washing dries on balcony railings. With typical attention to marginal detail, an adjoining street is visible on the left of the painting through the arches of the building. This prosaic scene has a hushed, other-worldly sense of melancholic beauty. Baroda in Gujarat features in the painting Fray, the characteristic long, sweeping street frontage with its numerous windows and apertures (no two ever the same); its balconies, architectural eccentricities and irregularities leading the eye to the painting’s edge, with the just discernible Hindu temple in the distance. In contrast some of the street scenes, like Pahali Kwa Babangu, The Milk Factory, and Steady Decline, do not teem with life- in fact they are conspicuous by the absence of people, and it is left to the architecture, the red brick Victorian buildings, the neo-soviet factory walls, the mish-mash of store fronts, some of which have seen better days, to recount their own stories. Though encompassing a much wider geographical subject area, Bhatt’s work echoes the spirit of George Bellows and Ben Shahn’s early twentieth century paintings of New York, a city which is, with a nod to Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, his latest source of inspiration. Bhatt paints the people and places he visits with great directness and sensitivity, shunning the temptation to be maudlin or voyeuristic. He has brought an understanding of the delicate requirements of geometry and symmetry to his own unique compositions. There is a quiet, ardent intensity in these works that, in weaving an intricate family ancestry with the social history that he has witnessed in shaping his own identity as a painter, conveys itself in paintings that bear a clear and passionate commitment to do justice to their subject matter. As he attests himself-‘Being in the street and drawing is the ultimate comfort’. It is not a comfort he is complacent with. As Seamus Heaney put it in his poem Changes ‘Remember this. It will be good for you to retrace this place when you have grown away and stand at last at the very centre of the empty city.’ Aidan Quinn March 2009
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