Right Brain Impulse

Artist: Samij Datta
Title: Right Brain Impulse (2008)
Medium: Mixed Media on Paper

Description: This painting based on Baudelaire’s poem “À une Dame créole”/ “To a Creole Lady” is a celebration of the activation of the five senses in man and his acceptance of the “true land of glory”. The virtues of the land of glory are signified by the creole woman to whom both the poem and the painting is a medium to address the acceptance of her race by the West. Historically this poem was first published in May, 1845, in L’Artiste and was the first poem where Baudelaire’s name appeared as a poet in the print. Dedicated to Madame Autard de Bragard, his host’s wife, the poem was sent in a letter to her husband. The painting identifies itself with Baudelaire’s “canopy of crimson trees” in the margin and the border of a central piece of work overlaid with a white background where three figures successively appear as the creole woman, the poet/narrator and Madam Autard de Bragard. The artist chooses a frame in which two colours are distributed in the margin itself as a décor to the centrality of the theme.

There is a sense of packaging in the art; crimson and prussian blue are used like strips to design the artwork. This is true because as the critic Walter Benjamin has said that Baudelaire’s poetry is to be rightly understood in relation to a commodity culture of the 19th century. “The allegorical poetics of Baudelaire are as intimately interwoven with the character and fetishization of the commodity as the arcades themselves. Indeed, for Benjamin there exists a particular electric affinity between the concept of allegory and the commodity form” (Gilloch, Graeme.Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City, Cambridge: Polity, 1996.). Now coming back to the poem and the painting, the artist, here, has rightly used the crimson as a part of the design itself to make him aware of a certain consciousness that comes with the phrase “under a canopy of crimson trees”. This is hyper sensitive perception of both words (that constitute meanings) and vibrations when they are uttered in a rhythm or recited or chanted. Baudelaire too was a man who could be reduced to a bundle of sensory nerves, neurons, dendrons and optic nerves. Because poetry to him is what he crowns as a condition of the infinite within the physical or vital where the aesthetics of colour, odour, touch, taste and sound combine internally to bear a receptacle where “a thousand sonnets grow in the hearts of the poets”. The subtle use of colours like flesh tint, thalo blue, lilac, yellow and grass green in the painting shows this process active with poem. The creole woman on the left stands tall than other figures, her face and hair black because she is the “dark enchantress”. Her posture is more confident in contrast to others; her hands and legs having the motion of a “huntress”. The artist has actually shifted the attention of gaze in the poem by the poet into a more deeper scrutiny of the actuality of the gaze not it terms of the beauty of the woman as expressed in words like “tender”, “warm”, “calm” but as a source of new knowledge, freedom and liberty. This becomes evident as the creole lady’s other hand is pointed towards the sun recalling the opening line “In the perfumed country which the sun caresses”. So this new knowledge which pre-existed the poet, was further available to him once he learned to unlearn what he has learned. It is the beauty of the inconscient that belongs to the “ancient manors” that enslaved Baudelaire in his verse because as the painting shows, the woman has enjoyed a deep caress of the sun. The division of colours in the woman’s body is nothing unusual; there is reflection of the same colour (flesh tint) both on the poet’s face who stands in the middle and on Madam Autard de Bragard’s body in the right. Also noticeable is the subtle use of a brown hue on Madam’s face which traditionally doesn’t allow its use since she is a white European woman. This play and interchange of the colours is done to cognize the painting the same way Baudelaire uses this pretence of the verse to cognize himself first and then through this in a letter his first reader Madam de Bragard. Woman is finally the subject of the painter and their liberation in the colour of Baudelaire’s poetry is what he aims to achieve. So, Madam gets the sensual lilac of the poet’s rejuvenation as well the traditional brown tint of a non-European woman. There is the same human element in three of them because the unread green grass of Loire or an exotic island which they trod are all caressed by the sun.

In the painting, Baudelaire finds himself in the middle introducing a lover to another lover- the Creole woman to the Madam because he himself is the prey to both the woman- to Madam as she is his first reader and to the Creole woman because her charms have enchanted him. A study of kinesics associated with the creole woman in the painting indicates that her left hand pointing towards the sky/sun is an affirmation of the doctrine that individuals can become divinities in their own right without any ritualistic belief in any moral code or worship of deities, something which Baudelaire confirmed when he said “there can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself” (Mon Coeur Mis À Nu, 1897). This doctrine is natural as patches of blue tint symbolizing the sky and the reflection of a liquid yellow on woman’s left symbolizing the sun. Baudelaire’s characters in the poem are finally engendered with naturalness but as the poet has always done, packaged with crimson to deceive us.
- Joy Roy Choudhury