Rickshawpolis (The Dented Chariot) - 4

Jitish Kallat's Rickshawpolis diptychs make "explicit the destructiveness that seams its way in the very fabric of the urban. 'Driving and Death' could well be the operative slogan here (in the manner of the signs cautioning prudence on the highway), although Kallat's paintings are, of course, rather more complex than the crude didacticism of the admonitory billboard. In each of these paired works (placed vertically rather than side to side, as in the traditional diptych format), the cursory outline drawing of the carcass of a vehicle surmounts a much larger painting incorporating a found image of an anatomical study, a juxtaposition that is in the nature of a pictorial rebus. So the viewer is invited to make the connections between the battered, smouldering remains of the car or van and the rippling centrifugal vortex that forms a backdrop to the skeletal body and its 'humours' (spit, phlegm, yellow bile…), if the splashes of metallic paint on the picture surface could be so described. And it is perhaps not insignificant that it is the anatomical image that bears the inscription 'The Dented Chariot' [...] One draws the conclusions after having seen with one's own eyes, which is what autopsy (to borrow Kallat's cryptic description of this work) literally means" (D. Ananth, 'Scare Quotes: Jitish Kallat's 'AgitPop'', Jitish Kallat - Rickshawpolis, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2007, pp. 12-13).