Real Men: Abir Karmakar / Unpublished

Intro: The pressure to be beautiful all the time gets to men too. In Abir Karmakar’s world, women aren’t the only ones being pushed to unreal standards of perfection says Gayatri

Men who choose to be seen naked, should have six pack abs. That is how it would seem. Look around you, even the ‘real men’ on the covers of health magazines, the average joe you would date, or the colleague in a boring pin-stripe shirt has something intelligent to say about health and works out at least twice a week, if he’s not ‘sporty’.

But not in artist Abir Karmakar’s world. He’s a little tired of the whole six pack thing, has been for a while now, and chooses to paint men real. It’s not just about exploiting the medium of oil paints for its god-given purpose; the exultation of tones of the human flesh in all its reality – stretch marked, dimpled, and belly-tiered, but it’s about finding the real man beneath all the hype.

“I’m not homosexual,” he candidly admits. “I’m straight. But because I’m not macho, and don’t fit into either the stereotypical standards of male and female, people are not able to slot me, so they struggle to find a tag for me.” The struggle affects the way people view his paintings too. His ‘Within The Walls’ is a body of work currently showing at curator Ranjana Steinrucke’s gallery in Mumbai. Siliguri-born Baroda-based Karmakar’s work has been tagged as having homosexual undertones by more than one casual reviewer.

“I’ve never struggled to deny or refute that because the confusion just adds to my social experiment,” says Karmakar quietly. “My men strike female poses, enjoy their bodies, look and feel and emanate an aura of having both genders within them. They are soft as well as strong, intuitive as well as logical, so the viewer cannot slot them. Making the viewer feel uncomfortable by not being able to find the tag that fits is the aim,” he smiles.

It is the anti-thesis to the world outside, he says. A world that beams images of perfect men, Greek gods in figure, impeccably dressed, perfectly wined, dined, suave with women and knowledgeable of the world. “Where is the space for the confused man? The awkward man? The man who can’t speak up for himself? The shy man?” he asks. The man who doesn’t win and who is yet not a loser? The man who is short and fat and probably balding too and is yet not pushing himself to perfection? “They don’t have space, they don’t fit. They don’t have a voice. So they get labeled by whatever suits the nearest observer,” he says.

But the space for him would now be in these paintings. Men in skirts, in silks, in heels, in make up and jewellery, men asking the viewer to challenge what they have seen and known of social concepts of men. Asking as Karmakar himself says, “Does this discomfort you?” It does. Very much. Because that is not what a man is supposed to be. But who is to say?

Times News Network
gayatri.jayaraman@timesgroup.com