The study of semiotics is marked by a curious cycle of behavioural oscillation. When the most superficial of signs reveal themselves, there's the thrill of applying newly acquired knowledge. When the mechanism of these signs is analysed, when one witnesses the diddling of off-guard brains, there's a quiet contemplation of human nature. And when you contemplate entire machineries of manipulation, like modern-day advertising or organised religion, you pause your reading to weep. Turns out, there are things you are happier not knowing, at least in the short term.

During the 20 or so minutes I spent staring at Shrimanti Saha's 'The Spine Collectors', a massive (58 by 104 inches) mixed media work (graphite, colour pencils, water colour, casein and collage on paper), I found myself wondering whether the artist, too, had been through this cycle. This work is part of the group show At the turn of a Page, curated by Shivangi Singh for Delhi's Vadehra Art Gallery: apart from Saha, there are works by Renuka Rajiv, Paul Barritt, Bakula Nayak and Treibor Mawlang.

'The Spine Collectors' is a mash-up of myths from all around the globe, with a simple catch: they are all in a state of suspended animation, as if the creatures making up the myth were caught mid-gesture, trapped. Towards the centre of the canvas, we see the sabotaged churning of the Ocean of Milk. Mount Mandara, the churning rod, lies restrained by a criss-crossing lever system. Scuba divers have whisked away Vishnu's turtle avatar, on whose back Mount Mandara was resting. Meanwhile, the divine gifts are being fished out like bodies out of a crime scene: among them Airavata, the white elephant who acts as Indra's vehicle. Hovering above, men with rotor-laden costumes have caught and restrained the falling Icarus. Closer inspection reveals that these men, busy worker bees all, are pouring out of the Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s cigar-shaped advanced submarine from Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Towards the right of centre-frame floats Sigmund Freud, from one of his most famous images, cigar in right hand, looking straight at the camera. He has the torso of a fish or a mythological aquatic reptile. His famous remark (that now appears to have been apocryphal) — “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” — is turned on its head by the Nautilus and its nefarious, relentless warriors, bent on destroying mythological structures. Freud is either observing or choreographing this mayhem (there is, after all, such a thing as analysing a concept to death). Either way, the destruction of mythologies will make us more alone, not less.

Roland Barthes, another man photographed with cigars often, was aware of this phenomenon when he wrote Mythologies (1957). In the essay 'The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat', Barthes says: “Verne has built a kind of self-sufficient cosmogony, which has its own categories, its own time, space, fulfilment and even existential principle. This principle, it seems to me, is the ceaseless action of secluding oneself. Imagination about travel corresponds in Verne to an exploration of closure, and the compatibility between Verne and childhood does not stem from a banal mystique of adventure, but on the contrary from a common delight in the finite, which one also finds in children’s passion for huts and tents: to enclose oneself and to settle, such is the existential dream of childhood and of Verne.” Barthes correctly notes that the men esconsed in the Nautilus are ultimately lone rangers, escapees from their inner selves: they look out at the world through the submarine's windows, “and thus define, in a single act, the inside by means of its opposite”.

Quite a few of the other works in the exhibition are instructive from a semiological point of view. The visual idiom of Bakula Nayak's works is inspired by illustrations in children's literature, with its bright colours, cartoony figures and languid, other-worldly aestheticism. But the real-world symbols like postcards and vintage currency notes (objects that the artist found) in the works is a strategic intervention: it tempers nostalgia into a more mature and holistic acceptance of the past. Renuka Rajiv's 'Family Jams', a series of family portraits, has an elegiac feel to it (coffee stains are used as colour in places). The words that pepper the paintings provide fodder for a three-dimensional appraisal of these figures: the captions form a narrative with continuity, letting the viewer in on private jokes and catch phrases.

Individual pages from Paul Barritt's Ten Leisure Machines, a book of sketches, are also on display. In one of these drawings, we see a man and a woman in identical, barrel-shaped machines marked 'Love'. Both have unremarkable hair but thoughts of a swankier hairdo preoccupy: wigs are floating above them, even as their bodies are hidden in the barrels. Who knows what new, hybrid forms might emerge? Reality won't pass muster afterwards. The fantasies aided and abetted by the love machines shall reign supreme. The interplay of the textual (the handpainted sign 'LOVE') and the visual (the machine, its power source, the discreet little plug) is used to underline a popular myth: that love will somehow make you (and your lover) a more 'beautiful' person, on the outside and on the inside.

I lingered the most, however, over the woodcuts of Treibor Mawlang, a young artist from Meghalaya. Most of these black-and-white works feature iconic portraits of men and women engaged in what defines them, often against all odds, including the possibility of natural catastrophes. Mawlang, who studied at Kala Bhawan, Shantiniketan from 2006-2012, told me about his discovery of the medium in an online interview.

“It was during my first year in Shantiniketan (2006) that I was introduced to the woodcut for the very first time. I use a wooden plank as the surface to work on. I apply a little black ink on the surface to differentiate between the cut and uncut portions. As of now, I only use black for printing.”. Mawlang spoke about his admiration for Frans Masereel, the Flemish painter and graphic artist who pioneered a movement of wordless graphic novels with his book Passionate Journey (1919), a collection of 167 woodcuts. Inspired by Masereel, the American artist Lynd Ward would go on to publish God's Man in 1929, the first of six graphic novels he created entirely in woodcuts. For years now, Mawlang has also been working on a graphic novel called Khasi Folktales, pages from which have been used for this exhibition.

Like Ward and Masereel, Mawlang's work is also informed by Expressionism, placing the subjectivity of human experience above all else, relying on an allegorical style and symbolism. 'The Blacksmith' is captured mid-gesture (as in Saha's 'The Spine Collectors'), hammer aloft, poised to strike the hot iron. In the background, we can see the assorted paraphernalia of his work, the painstaking processes that he goes through every time he creates. The figures of 'The Patient' and his long suffering wife/daughter/sister suggest a kind of quiet resistance against fate: the large, overbearing, starkly detailed hospital bed, the serpentine IV lines and the claustrophobic nature of the room suggest that the end is nigh. And yet, we know that the two of them — the patient and the devoted woman attending to him — will wake up to stare down another challenging day. 'The Hearth' shows a woman cooking with a wooden stove over an open flame: the fire curls extravagantly, the smoke threatens to obscure the painting altogether and yet, the woman is tending to the hearth with a practiced, unperturbed hand.

Mawlang said: “The patient is my uncle, the artist is my friend, the homemaker is my friend, the woman in the hearth is my mom and so on. I don't know whether I am observing the subjects in their own engagements or I see a reflection in them. Each one is attentively engaged in their own duties. They are all doing their duties of their own time and situation. They are all trapped but they don't seem to give up.” The woodcuts, then, are representative of a recurring figure in Khasi mythology: the steadfast, back-against-the-wall hero struggling against natural and man-made obstacles (but especially the former). “I have been engaged in drawings more than woodcut,” Mawlang said. “But the graphic quality is very strong in this medium. You can feel its depth.”

I found Mawlang and Saha's works to be conduits, in terms of their relationship with symbols. The Nautilus crew from 'The Spine Collectors' are scared of what symbols will force them to confront, while 'The Patient' is the triumph of faith through symbols; notice how the patient is positioned as a sort of deity, the woman sitting respectfully at his feet. These characters' histories, or possible trajectories of the same, suggest themselves subtly, and that is their greatest strength.

(At the turn of a Page is on display at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi till May 31, 11am-7pm)

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