Was: Is by Michael Husmann, Pascale Mira Tschaeni, Aditya Pande

I'll be honest. Aditya Pande's last showing in Mumbai, also at Chatterjee and Lal, was one of the more disappointing shows of that year for me. He may know how to operate his drawing software but the wall that he doodled on as a 'live act' during his last show was mostly a tangle of messy scrawls. So my expectations were not particularly high when I waddled over to see his new show, this time with two Swiss artists, Michael Husmann and Pascale Mira Tschaeni. I didn't see the opening, which had a performance by the Swiss duo and their kids (I think), so I can't tell whether the show becomes more eloquent for those who did see the performance.

Perhaps because my expectations were rather low, I was rather pleasantly surprised by the fact that I didn't entirely dislike "Was:Is". (I'm possibly mellowing in my old age. I was quite taken aback by how much I liked Swati Khurana's "Love Letters and Other Necessary Fictions" at the same gallery. It had all the clichés but still managed to steer clear of the predictable kitschy feel that characterises so many diaspora artists. There was something poignant and melancholic to the whole show, especially when you knew that the marriage that had been celebrated with such glitter and glee had ultimately fallen apart.) Not only that, I liked quite a few of Pande's pieces in "Was:Is". The best works of his last show were those in which he used the spidery lines of his vector drawings to draw out figures that were a curious combination of juvenile doodling and sophisticated observations. A few of the works in "Was: Is" have that mix but as in his last show, there's a tendency in Pande to do too much in each work. Often, this results in his prints looking messy and communicating nothing.

In "Was: Is", however, Pande is mostly overshadowed by Husmann and Tschaeni's trippy paintings on perspex. They're colourful, psychedelic and fantastical. The couple's two children star in most of the works and it helps that they're cute. Dressed up in curious outfits, surrounded by swirling colours, floating foliage and bric-a-brac, Husmann and Tschaeni's works are like the wonderland a stoned Woodstock regular might have imagined after a narcotic encounter. Yet, there's something almost classical about the realism with which some of the faces and the details are painted. Both Pande and the Swiss duo borrow bits and bobs from various traditions (Pande turns to Mohenjodaro in one of his works) to create works that try to hover between myth and reality. In many ways, "Was: Is" shows the artists responding to one another in an interesting manner. Husmann and Tschaeni's works have an eeriness to them that ultimately makes them more intriguing than most of Pande's squiggles.

For instance, their video piece shows the kids sitting down to a tea party in the middle of a snowy alpine scene that deserves to be on the cover a Season's Greetings card. They drink something disturbingly red and thick in delicate china, and eat cupcakes whose pink frosting looked weirdly flesh-like to me. Then, after singing a song, the two enter a moving swamp of fabric. The swamp keeps undulating and then limbs, cocooned in fabric, shoot out sporadically. Is that a desperate call for help by the kids or is it a sign of frolic? Depends on what you drank at the tea party, I suppose.