The attempt to use traditional techniques and modes of representation to create an individual vision of the ‘modern’ unites the three accomplished artists reviewed here. In each case, there is a skilled and loving engagement with a particular craft, naturally inherited or consciously mastered. The work that comes out of that mastery, in its self-conscious wit, playfulness or stylization, is necessarily contemporary. But questions arise about how this modernity could evolve. Where will the work go from here, if the artist chooses to remain faithful to the demands of his or her chosen craft or tradition?

Ramesh Gorjala’s Embracing Modernity (Mon Art Gallerie, until August 31) has been curated with this problem specifically in mind. Belonging to the Kalahasti region on the banks of the Swarnamukhi river in Andhra Pradesh, Gorjala started out as a rural artist, trained in the local art of Kalamkari — the narrative and decorative craft of the kalam or stylus using vegetable colours on hand-woven cotton. He then went on to study the fine arts in Hyderabad, an experience that resulted in his transferring the Kalamkari style and technique onto the canvas of ‘modern art’. This show brings together several large canvases, each depicting a Hindu deity from the Puranas or a character from the epics. This central figure is enmeshed in and holds together a teeming world of stories. It embodies the unity-in-copiousness of a certain kind of Hinduism: the problem of the One and the Many, the One in the Many. The principal deities are Hanuman (picture, left), Krishna and Vishnu, placed alongside Arjuna, Ganesha and the Buddha.

A variety of pleasures is afforded here by the intricate use of different kinds of line, colour, texture and scale, counterpointing larger-than-life, single figures with a swirling multiplicity of lesser human action and detail. The execution is widely allusive, variously invoking the Ajanta murals, Indonesian and Balinese religious art, Oriya pata-chitra, Madhuvani painting and Gandhara Buddhism. The Hyderabadi artist, Thotha Vaikuntham, is another major influence, especially in the Hanuman faces. This density of matter and the variety of styles are, however, not the same as complexity. Looking at these canvases as a sequence, one is left with the impression of a deftly executed, but repetitive flatness that never quite manages to complicate itself into spiritual depth. Depending on who picks up these paintings, and for what sort of a drawing room, Gorjala’s work hovers close to, and often tips over into, opulent decoration.

Miniatures (Gallery Sanskriti, until August 15) brings together the work of Mahaveer Swami and Ariane Mercier. Each artist revives, and plays with, in his or her own exquisitely fine way, the Bikaner and the Mughal/Persian schools of miniature painting. Swami’s little paintings fall into two groups. First, a series of Sufi heads, and of single or grouped Sufi figures. Their upturned eyes, delicate hands and long beards, done with astonishing virtuosity, create an effect of mystical fineness that evokes the spiritual and aesthetic ambience within which such an art is perfected and savoured. Then there are the figures of workers, craftsmen and social types, either plying their trade or invoked through wonderfully detailed depictions of their tools: goldsmiths, ironsmiths, carpenters, musicians, thakurs, doctors, accountant, bhistis and khajanchis (top right). There is also a series of toys and tiloniya (hanging birds made of stuffed cloth). Perhaps what inspires these finely done images is a kind of love — for the mystics and the spirituality they practised, for the ordinary people and the crafts they plied, and for the art of miniature painting itself and the bits of history it beautifully depicts.

Ariane Mercier’s delicate pictures (natural pigments on paper, of the same size as Swami’s images) are another kind of sophisticated and subtle-souled homage to Bikaner miniature-painting. Her “Bikaner Sweets” series — each depicting an intricately confected sweetmeat in paper-foil — savours the delicious and the ephemeral. So does her “Ice-Candy” series — ice-lollies and shaped granitas, creatures of a curious, nonhuman mildness and innocence, who seem to be touchingly oblivious of the shortness of their lives. She also paints, in sharp and loving detail, fragments of Bikaner walls of bricks and of stones, their tops lined with broken glass.

Then there are the maps (bottom right) — topographical surveys, with rivers, hills and temples, creating patterns and arabesques that look like fantastical flowers, leaves and mushrooms. This, too, is an art of diminution, bringing out a tenderness that we must feel, with the artist, for the ordinary, the fragile and the small.