Bad Actors

Bad Actors

Sangram Majumdar

For Sangram Majumdar (b. 1976, lives and works in Seattle, Washington), the word actor separates a person from a character. It is this in-between address that the paintings—which teem with eyes, faces, claws, hoofs, anklets, horned pumpkins, nets, letters, ornate frames and displaced grills, and which evoke crowds, overstimulation, frenzy, riotous gathering and celebratory cheer—are after. Drawing on the US term “bad actor” for an immoral or delinquent figure, and leaning into, while reversing, these actors’ shiftiness, the exhibition wishes to act, in an impulse that recalls the meticulous recasting of such stock types as badmaashes, thugs, and bandits by social historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Radhika Singha, from this in-between place on the polarized present.

  In Bad Actors, ambivalent actors, even under extreme pressure, reassess their charged communities. The works are densely layered, often exfoliated, compositions, with shapes that restlessly move, stomping and dancing and pushing for attention, retreating and stepping loudly into and out of their lines and frames. Part evil, part apotropaic, they are somehow of the same world as Guston, Picasso’s Harpies, Arpita Singh’s peeping goons, Tyeb Mehta’s Kali, Lankinis in Pahari painting, and Lorenzetti’s horned and fanged tyrant at the Palazzo Pubblico in Sienna. Monstermashup. In The Informant (2026), the monster, in Majumdar’s riotous colors of red, purple, pink, orange, yellow, and sky blue exceeds the line. Caught in the shape of one of Majumdar’s favorite references, the white demon slain by Rustam in his seventh and final labor in the Shahnameh, as referenced by the white glyph of a moving arm, the figure demands its continuous formation, revealing densely painted insides and moving multiple limbs in a reverberating frame.

  Writing in 1935, Walter Benjamin described the actor reaching people through a camera as newly dependent on them: as the movement of the body and the movement of the camera are estranged, the actor becomes subject to a series of “optical tests” to which the audience, at a distance, following the camera, can be a judge. In Majumdar’s paintings, the figures which are indeterminate, emergent, retreating, half finished, multi-dimensional, are acting apart from us in painterly ways so that we can, with the help of their resistance, gauge them as characters, test and see what sort of role we let them settle into. In the use of Teras (2026) as a title, Majumdar refers to the ancient Greek τέρας, which means not firm earth (terra) but a sign, a wonder, a marvel, a portent; a monster. This liquid ground, painting as an actor, is Majumdar’s offering for our present.

–– Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen