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Karmkars paintings show a tongue, a huge tongue which licks and caresses, sucks parts of a body. It is a self affecting tongue, a tongue which explores and worships and nearly eats parts of the body to which it belongs.

The title “I love therefore I am” invites to relate this tongue to loving and being. But Karmakar is not writing about his tongue and the body belonging to this tongue. Karmakar paints something which stands not in a direct logical chain of reasoning with this words.

Therefore the title serves as an uncanny invitation. It invites not to reason according to linguistic paths, but to follow the gaze towards strange moments, towards somebody `s affection of or for himself.

Nils Röller New Delhi/Sanskriti Kendra

Descartes writes: “I am thinking, therefore I am being”. Thereby Descartes takes a certain logic for granted: The logic of coming from one premise to a conclusion.

Abir Karmakar appropriates for his purposes this logic. Karmakar writes: I love therefore I am. Therefore we may use this logic in approaching his tenting images. But there is a difference: The major difference between image and text. Kamarkar adopts the logic of speech. This is the logic of reasoning with linguistic concepts. This logic he sets in a relation with images, which seem to challenge linguistic concepts in a special, disturbing, twofold manner.

Nils Röller New Delhi/Sanskriti Kendra

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Do we have any right to use the word logic here? Here, in front of Karmakars images?Karmakar labels his paintings with the title “I am loving, therefore I am being”

The word “therefore” challenges. Juxtaposing his paintings with this word, Karmakars dark twilightening images provocate even more. They challenge the power and tradition of western reasoning. The provocate those who base their scientific arguments on the reasoning of Descartes.

Descartes- philosopher and one of the most distinguished mathematician of history -wrote in his Discourse on method: I am thinking, therefore I am being.

Nils Röller New Delhi/Sanskriti Kendra

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Abir Karmakars painting create a disturbing uncanny effect. They are producing an uncomfortable dizziness, a state of inbetweenness, a state between curiosity and disgust, between a disire to watch, a lust to gaze on one hand and on the other hand they create a wish to distance oneself from this desire, this curious lust and this tempting pictures who are able to awake this sort of unstability in oneself.

The twilight of Abirs colors is thundering and negatively lightening. Negativ in the sense of the negative of a print or of a photography . The paintings are lightening negativly, displaying those shadows, which enable our reasoning to shine brightly.

Abirs blackbrown, fleshy, licking colours stand for a general statement. They stand for artists challenging the empire of the logocentric light in general. But do we have any right to use the word “logic” here?

Nils Röller New Delhi/Sanskriti Kendra

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(Barbara Ellmerer)

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