A faceless Carla Bruni

The showers on Thursday evening (17 September 2009) coincided with the inauguration of 'Moment, Intercepted', a painting exhibition featuring B Devaraj and M S Prakash Babu.

Prakash's work as a cartoonist and illustrator is regularly seen in the Times of India, Bangalore, but not many know about his painterly side. He is also an independent film-maker, and has produced and directed some quirky short films.

This painting exhibition, his first in 11 years, focuses on formal situations, such as ministers meeting, soldiers marching, and 'first ladies' watching ceremonial parades, all of which he says he has tried to satirise.

Prakash portrays political photo-ops in conservative brush strokes, the irony coming through only in what he chooses to leave out.
In the painting of the wives of the Indian and French premiers, Prakash keeps a little of Gursharan Kaur's face and almost fully crops out the face of the glamorous Carla Bruni.

When he paints two ambassadors talking, he only shows their gesturing hands and a slightly less anonymous scribe.

Although Prakash thinks of himself as a satirist, his work hints at a fascination for the formal and the understated, qualities not so overwhelmingly important in satire. His entire show is done in muted colours.

You won't find Picasso- or Dali-like exaggeration in his lines, but you may catch some stylistic inspiration from Cezanne, and perhaps Rembrandt. Prakash's idiom is a gently self-conscious realism.

Devaraj's work is more stark. He forgoes colours, and plays in black and white to create monk-like figures, sitting in the midst of religiously loaded metaphors such as conches, sea shells, and nails.

His gentle-faced characters use the sacred as a shield against the harshness of the world, and their own inner demons. They are tormented, but not bereft of hope.

Prakash Babu was mortified when I asked him to pose for a photograph in front of one of his paintings. "I'm not that sort," he protested, as though we were asking him to pose as the MiD DAY mate. Prakash can be stubbornly reticent, and fervently abstract.

His talented actress-wife Bhavani happily stood against one of his paintings, and we bring you a very informal phone picture as a souvenir from the event.

Both Devaraj (b 1966) and Prakash (b 1968) hail from Karnataka, and have held exhibitions across the country.

Their show, curated by Giridhar Khasnis, is on at Time and Space Gallery on Lavelle Road.