A R T M A T T E R S ECS Magazine, December 2007 By Sushma Joshi Giovanni Battista Ambrosini is 59 years old, but as he crouches on the ground and assiduously draws his signature image—a figure that could be a bird, a child, a spirit—with a white wax-stick on a canvas stretched out on the tiles of Babar Mahal Revisited’s courtyard, he appears centuries older. The white mane of hair looks familiar, so does the high forehead. Does Giovanni descend from a long line of artists in Italy? Did his ancestor exhibit alongside Leonardo da Vinci in some of Florence’s prestigious studios? This question goes unanswered. He seems as blithely unconcerned with the vagaries of history and parentage as he is with the sacredness of the canvas, which Nepali artists treat as a treasured space that would be sullied by the slightest disrespect. Meanwhile, on the canvas spread out on the courtyard, Giovanni directs four young women to dance with naked feet. Like the wind, the young women are his c...
The civil wars of the twenty-first century: Sushma Joshi's slightly twisted perspective of the universe.