There
is something sad and ridiculous about the band. A legacy from our erstwhile
English rulers, whether official or military in pompous regalia, or shabbily
costumed when accompanying middle-class marriage processions in the cities,
the band is a macabre comment on bourgeois existence. While Krishen has
dealt with this theme before, he has come back to it in his recent work.
From the series on the truck - the ramshackle
juggernaut hurtling into space 
piled
up with construction materials and brutalized labour, to the generals and
politicians negotiating peace around the table with the skeleton of humanity
lying under it, to Jesus and his betrayal, to the cacophonic irrelevance
of the march-ing band, Krishen has been preoccu-pied in his work with the
state and fate of man in our times. In a sense, his work is a graphic record,
a visual documentation. What makes it art and lifts it out of the transient,
are the abiding elements of the tragic, the sublime and the ridiculous
-which are woven into it.
In his recent work, Krishen has unleashed himself into more sponta-neously
expressionistic brush work and colour, eminently suited to the bedlam,
the frenzied ritual of the incongruous band. In a phase in Indian painting
when there is an epidemic of figuration in the name of humanistic considerations,
Krishen's work has a persistent presence, free of any cult orientation.
It is Krishen's primary commitment to his medium that brings relevance
to his subject matter in art and lifts the mundane to the realm of the
poignant.
J Swaminathan
Bhopal
September 1989
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