It is no longer bound by a rectangle, by a wall or by its frame and not everything is courtesy of Camlin, Winsor and Newton or the artist's supply shop. This art that is being created plays with the real and with the imaginary and uses objects and materials to construct an experience like that of a painting.

Young artists born in the '50s and '60s like Tushar Joag, Kaushik, Sudarshan Shetty, Sheela Gowda, Mayura Subedar and Rina Saini have walked onto the Indian artworld's centrestage and are making art as they might make any other lifestyle choice -- with nonconformity and individuality.

Not only are they dissolving the barriers between painting and sculpture but they are also incorporating photographs, words, video, sound,film and objects into their work. What they are saying is that art can take virtually any physical form and can be made of any sort of material.

For example -- a chair, aerosol sprays, a doorknob, a lily, rainwater, an elbow, a parcel of land, neon, a tabla, even pillows. Because the work often has radical content it, goes under the rubric of `conceptualism' -- art that is made to engage the mind of the viewer rather than the eye.

One might ask -- what does all this mean? Is this `antiformal' work trying to negate art? Is it the enemy of everything that has been achieved so far by other artists? Is painting being relegated, was it an interesting and influential medium in its time, but one that has had its day? Is this kind of new art high on gimmick and low on technical skill, talent and insight? I don't think so. Firstly, painting needs no resuscitation.

Whether figurative or pure abstraction, it is very much alive and shows new and extraordinary properties as seen in the work of Atul and AnjuDodiya, Bhupen Khakhar Nalini Malani, Jitish Kallat and Chitrovonu Mazumdar.

Secondly, because our reaction to the modern is so grudging that we have developed a mistrust of the unfamiliar and a preference for art which has been sanctified by time. Our craving for the works of Ravi Varma, Jamini Roy, Amrita Sher-Gil, M F Husain, Ara, Anjolie Ela Menon, Ganesh Pyne and others has swelled to addictive proportions. It has made us blind to the fact that this new art is of consequence.

In fact, the truth is that these artists can no more be written out of the art history books and that if Indian art has ever had the best chance to enter the international art scene, it is today, with these art forms. These are artists who are accepted as part of the international neo-avante garde, because they have complete knowledge of recent art developments abroad and are successfully able to challenge and extend it.

Lastly, and more importantly, we must know that this conceptual art is as valid as traditionalpainting and sculpture even if there are some ill-considered ensembles brimming with unfocused opportunities. We don't have to judge one style against the other. There is no competition or contest of genres. All the art of the present shall become the art of the past. Some of it will be vilified, some of it forgotten.

It will be up to the work's future audience to give it its worth. In the meantime, all that I want to do is to be stupefied, transported, unsettled, enraptured and stimulated when I look at the new work around me. I want to be able to forget what the great Matisse said that he wanted art to be like a comfortable armchair for a tired businessman to rest in.