Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 homes)

2000
Mixed media on canvas
96 x 216 in. / 244 x 549 cm.

The painterly tradition of self-portraiture finds expression—albeit in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek manner—in many of Kallat’s early paintings, where he appears variously as a rucksack-wielding art student, a white-robed priest or in the case of Modus Vivendi (1000 people – 1000 homes), a cocky bespectacled juggler of heart and brain.

Modus Vivendi is an exploration of selfhood in the city where the individual, lost among thronging multitudes, wanders in a state of perpetual disorientation. As in the painting Maternamortal (Mom’s Mom’s Mom- Mom’s Dad’s Mom) (2000), time is evoked here as routine—represented by a wreath of knife-wielding hands engaged in a repetitive action of peeling. Radiating streaks of red, orange and green, reminiscent of thermal photographs, outline these self images. Interconnected nodes evoking neural networks and constellation maps traverse the different image fragments creating ambivalent connections.