One is far more likely to encounter Warli painting out and about today than in a gallery or museum. It appears on “beautified” city walls, the sides of bridges, notebooks and saris in souvenir shops. The familiar white stick figures have become so pervasive that they have, in a sense, become invisible. In their repetition, the narrative and conceptual qualities of the Warli painting tradition are reduced to pattern and decoration.
The irony is that Jivya Soma Mashe (1934-2018), the artist most responsible for bringing Warli painting into the contemporary imagination, did almost the opposite. Drawing on a communal tradition of wall painting, he developed an intensely individual vocabulary to describe the world around him. He recorded scenes of village life, the social relationships he observed, the cosmology he inherited, and the effects of modern ways on the landscape of rural life, while also imagining new possibilities within its formal language. In doing so, he established many of the forms and conventions that have since come to define “Warli art”.
The paintings in this exhibition, spanning two to three decades of Mashe’s practice, reveal the intelligence and curiosity behind this transformation. Daily activities such as farming, hunting, cooking, dancing and worship sit alongside animals, spirits and cosmological phenomena. Elsewhere, trains, cars, cameras and other signs of modernity enter the village, creating encounters between the world Mashe was born into and the rapidly changing India around him. His response is rarely straightforward. He observes, rearranges and sometimes gently mocks what he sees.
As Yashodhara Dalmia wrote in 1985, “[Jivya’s] work, however, can in no way be equated to Warli Art, which exists at a specific time for a specific purpose. If anything he is the only successful example of a person, who has been able to make a break from his tradition and yet carry it forward.”
That break was consequential. Mashe expanded the possibilities of a tradition rooted in communal ritual into a vehicle for individual expression, enabling generations of artists from the Warli community to develop their own ideas and imaginations.
To look closely at Mashe’s paintings is therefore to encounter something quite different from the ubiquitous “Warli style”. There is a remarkably alert mind at work here: subversive, humorous and deeply attentive to both his inherited world and the transformations taking place around him.