Bursting with color, emotion and sympathetic irony, ‘Sulemani Chai’ captures the everyday kitsch of India through the eyes of the series’ recurring characters and their desires, dilemmas and decisions. Nilofer Suleman’s acrylics on canvas explode with humor−employing language and archetype as comedic tools−and deep-seated hope. Her exhibit seems to hypothesize that the survival of Everyman in India is contingent upon three main mediums: God, money and Bollywood. In locating the heart of India in faith, prosperity and romance, Suleman’s canvases give us a chance to classify the chaotic world of the streets and see, through bright paint and pattern, something of the invisible.   

In ‘Good Luck Hair Dresses for Gents, Ladies & All,’ the shy, naïve Chinnama sweeps the floor, divided between the good, honest Jayaram and the sleezy Tiger Murgesh. Suleman’s protagonists (I use this word because the paintings are stories too) are bold and semi-abstract, their faces ‘primitive’ in puppet-like humor. Yet Suleman adds in details—Tiger’s mustache and curly hair, a side-part in Jayaram’s hair, Chinnama’s bindi—that make them distinct characters. She urges the viewer to look beyond their seemingly anonymous faces−into the color and past the abstraction−and find their hearts. As the narrative unfolds, Chinnama and her men become the center of a traditionally convoluted Bollywoodesque love triangle, mimicking the movie stars they are so entranced by, and becoming the stories that adorn the walls of the barber-shop or ice cream parlor that they find themselves wandering through.

Suleman describes her work as “Maps, masks, canvas, figures, feelings, semi- abstraction, color, puppets, laughter, catharsis, expression, experiences and emotions flowing out of the tip of her brush.” She invokes the icons pop culture, extending her bright colors almost to the point of farce or stereotype.  Her depiction of street graphics is similarly exuberant and mimetic.  Suleman’s work foregrounds the eternal humor that arises from the gap between language and concept, as well as the fraught and omnipresent indices of Western influence that pepper the Indian everyday. The juxtaposition of icons of western sexuality and Indian gods and goddesses dramatize through humor, the omnipresent contradictions that characterize 21st century India.

Suleman gives center stage to the ‘general fixer,’ the loafer who is always around: at chai stalls, leaning on traffic poles, smoking cigarettes, ready to do small chores, chat, or simply watch life go by. In these everyday stories from the streets, she finds much larger notions: the pendulums of the marketplace, corruption, love, gender, sexuality, religion, superstition and most of all, hope.  Her strong sense of color, emotion, composition, and detail makes for canvas that appear as an array of Indian sweets, or one of the very Bollywood film posters that animate her character’s lives.

At the heart of each painting are the soft eyes and sensitive hands of Suleman herself: an artist who has wandered the streets learning her subjects, not just looking at their lives from afar, but seeing the people behind their professions. We are individually multiple: we sell eggs as we eye the lady buying them; we promise our fish is fresh as the flies atop them grow plump and old; we paint the things that bring us peace even as our subjects hold, in their eyes and in their hearts, an undying desire for more.

-- Himali Singh Soin

(Images, from top to bottom: Hasino ka kamaal: Rosy Falooda and Kulfi,Nilofer Suleman; Bollywood and Imported English Cut Indian Cut Multicolor Hair Dye, Nilofer Suleman; Fresh Fish since 1979, Nilofer Suleman; Stick No Bills-- Specialist Astrologer, Nilofer Suleman.  All images courtesy of Art Musings, and the artist.)