“This film isn’t so much a portrait of Kumar (although a portrait does wick to the surface – barely) but a fragmented psychogeography, where the painter is essentially a guide, both directly and as an energy. Now in his 90s, he seems to be living out his life in constant discovery mode, tracking through memories, thumbing through books, so deep in thought that he doesn’t seem to notice the telephone ringing in a distant room (or perhaps, because of his advanced age, can’t hear it).
We see less of his work and him working on it than the environment and what it suggests. One painting we do see in full is in an anachronistic, muralist style, with three rural worker figures looking up at the sky, agog, mouths opened for rain. Somewhere in one of the countless mounds of paint on the canvas is a coiled squiggle that looks like a buried signature but is probably just a coiled squiggle. Dutta follows the connections that emerge from beneath the brush strokes, intuitively, but the film isn’t merely observational; it’s discursive, free-associative, at times elliptical; it talks.
The film is a sketch, a flurry of ideas, catalyzed by visiting the painter’s studio. In a sense it’s another “artist and [his] city” film, like Robert Gardner’s Mark Tobey portrait, or Manoel de Oliveira’s ode to Oporto via the watercolors of António Cruz. In Kumar’s studio and in galleries, finished paintings lean at us from odd angles, get intensified in long shadows against raking museum light. They’re far from static, two-dimensional, or straightforward. They resist leveling, and thus objecthood. The film’s more contemplative moments happen with the artist himself, hunched ninety degrees, as he stands in front of a canvas. He’s not relaxing, not ever; painting is a constant action, sometimes latent, sometimes subdued. He walks over to it carefully, almost warily, and adds a daub before retreating back to look the whole thing over again.”
An analysis by VoiceThrower on Even Red Can Be Sad लाल भी उदास हो सकता है (Amit Dutta, 2015)
