“He’d sit in the garden of his Ahmedabad home and observe nature,” Hoof recalls. “He’d see a leaf falling and wonder aloud what it must be feeling.” For Doshi, such journeys through “mindscapes” became exercises in unpeeling layers, exploring “a world within a world within a world”, as Hoof puts it. “The main image keeps appearing and disappearing as you observe from close and afar.”
Doshi’s affinity for distortions, for instance, is evident in his drawing of three jugs with handles, balanced precariously, next to a baby jug. Or these may well be three hooded people, or birds, wobbling next to a smaller version of themselves. You can stare all you want, but the composition won’t yield one meaning. “He, too, had no signature style, there was never one BV Doshi,” says Hoof.
Doshi lived by the dictum of his early guru, the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, who believed in a new beginning each morning. Taking a cue from the master, his disciple vowed not to repeat the tropes Le Corbusier made his own. “Be it in his art or architecture, he was more attached to the process than the product,” Hoof says. Nothing was too trivial to experiment with. If he made a so-called error while signing books, he doodled something rich and strange out of it.
“If there’s one lesson I’ve learnt from him, it is about his faith in the power of fiction,” Hoof says. “All his life, he believed that everything around us is flowing and evolving all the time, and that architecture, like art, is ultimately an act of storytelling. It can be made fresh with each telling.”
Blueprints of Illusions is on at Vadehra Art Gallery, D-40 Defence Colony, New Delhi, till 12 November.
Also read: In photos: A rare glimpse into the private life of BV Doshi
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Also read: Remembering B.V. Doshi
