Making Sense of Humour

Singh calls his humour lopsided. “I think I have a loopy sense of humour. I can’t explain it, but the guy in the sketches, who is also called Gagan Singh, tries to,” the artist says. Singh’s protagonist in the doodles, a befuddled Sardar, struggles with the seemingly smaller problems of life. He drives a Maruti 800 and worries that his car will turn into a transformer. He is often burdened with the pressing problems of choosing between shoes and chappals.

Singh’s humour is evident also in his stories. He recounts how he got bored of his near-shambles Maruti 800 and sold it only to buy a new one of the same make. Or the absurd things he would say merely to get a reaction out of people. “I would go to people’s houses and demand to be fed butter chicken. And I don’t even like butter chicken much,” he says. Somewhere within these quirks, however, there’s a commentary on social issues: economy, living conditions, health among other things.

A full-time businessman who runs a telecom enterprise he has inherited, doodling was incidental. Keen to get away from work, he took to sketching. But he decided to give art a shot and got a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the UK. “But when I came back to Delhi in 2005, it was difficult breaking into the art scene,” he says. Gallerists would ask him if he had any work in colour or if he painted on canvas. He got a break in 2008 and started to show at smaller galleries before the audience caught on to his humour.

Now, Singh is exploring his art through newer forms. With a grant from the Indian Foundation for the Arts, Singh is learning to animate. This newly-animated Gagan Singh walks into the gallery, obsessively trying to clean a white wall.

Singh’s exhibition also includes a large number of erotica, a genre that has fascinated the otherwise-shy artist. “I’ve been working on erotica for about five years now, but never got a chance to display it,” he says. There’s a sense of frenzy in his fantasy-meets-erotica works. In one, multiple phalli stick out of a bunch of animals, humans and beasts as they copulate. “The first thing people ask me is if sex is on my mind the whole time. But erotica brings out the most imaginative and creative part of me. It’s liberating to create something so wild and watch it go out of control,” he says.

amruta.lakhe@expressindia.com