Faces and bodies speak of the human conundrum. Traits of an insensate world, everyday objects and descriptions are transformed by artist Sreeja Pallam to images that break the suppressed silence born out of societal collusion.
On display in ‘Biorhythms’ at Museum Auditorium were 29 acrylic on canvas frames that are deeply etched in the contemporary. The artist is not a mere observer of events panning out – she prods, provokes and prompts you to introspect and react. “Rather than speak on my own works, I value the feedback from the viewer that would spur me on,” says the artist.
While the artist dwells on the human predicament, it is the woman who takes up a prime position within the canvas as the unheard, unseen voice. Two works from her ‘Chromatic Missives’ series entrust the woman with the immense responsibility and commitment of nurturing not just mankind, but all living creatures. It is the womb of new sensibilities that is symbolised here. The gift of creation that we are born with thrusts the task of protecting the world around in us and that by itself is a sublime act/state. But that in reality in no way places her on a pedestal: ‘Togs of somebody’s choice,’ which depicts three female forms suspended in mid-air, brings us closer to puppets-on-a-string condition, or, in ‘Toast’ where the woman shares space on the platter with other consumables, then, she is commodity. The latter, the artist explains, is something women bring upon themselves by permitting society to use them on these lines.
Beyond saluting the act of creation, the woman owes to the offspring a responsibility of bequeathing an environmentally safer earth, the artist articulates in one of the works.
The emotional landscapes she portrays are not calm. The brooding eyes are haunting. Resigned and passive, shorn of softness and beauty, a sense of foreboding and nervousness prevails, the heavy burdens of life that weigh on the human being have been decoded with varying intensity. There are frames where the artist sees human beings as victims of their own making, be it the tomes that are to be crammed by a child or the suffocating urban landscape they create.
The pictorial surfaces have a balance and ordering (‘Crowds’, ‘Shove’) which speak of the multitudes affected by the concerns that get narrated here. The disturbed and aberrant human condition in unrepressed colour lends a new resonance to the themes that Sreeja has chosen to depict.
