When one puts a glass on a painting, it protects its surface but pushes the image back. But when one paints on the glass itself, the image presses through, the colours get keyed up, the lines gain precision. Even the most informal scribble achieves an air of gravity. And the whole becomes a gripping artefact.
(KG Subramanyan-The Magic of Making (Seagull Publications)
The artist, the muralist, the mentor, the essayist, the fabulist and a metaphoric linguist, it is worthwhile to read Subramanyan’s essays and then step into Aakriti Gallery at Lado Sarai to view this historic tribute that transcends all barriers and tells us that even at 92 Subramanyan loved chasing the colours of a rainbow.
Sketches, scribbles, drawings and recent works – 303 works unveiled on the walls of Aakriti Gallery in Delhi to celebrate Professor K G Subramanyan’s life. Subramanyan, who passed away on June 29 plundered the world’s storehouse of images with effortless ease, created conversations out of contradictions and morphed them just the way he wanted to. Seagull Foundation for Arts Kolkata and Aakriti Gallery come together for this ode.
A radical who often debated Western notions of art criticism he felt everything in art must not be analysed we must leave some air for the mystery. This is why he even took apart the famous words of Seneca: “I do not want to be oppressed by the feeling that art is long, life is short. Life is certainly short – even a long life is not long enough for us to achieve what all we want. But the language of art should emerge naturally, with ease and spontaneity, out of our responses to our environment and out of our inner vision.”
Look around this show and you need not be confined to earth colours like burnt sienna, Indian red and green variations. You can see jewelled tones in his reverse painting on acrylics as well as his paper works – energised with a freshness and vigour that belongs to poetic fantasies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Art students and younger artists can study his treatment of colour with the three mediums acrylic and gouache and pen and ink. His felicity at introducing infinite variations on his choreography of characters – animated goddesses, demons, hybrids, and birds and beasts that are constant companions is charismatic. His brisk brushstrokes capture every nuance of movements and moods – his drawings bring forth a carnival of animals – goats in fervent conversation, a rooster in an act of royal reflection – each mood is captured with amazing precision. This is the mirth of existence, a mosaic of rural arcadia.
This entire collection belongs to Naveen Kishore – he has spent three days in Delhi supervising the unveiling. Two floors of Subramanyan works at this magnificent new space tells us he had a voracious appetite for ancient cultures, myths and legends of countries all over the world. His reverse paintings on acrylic sheets and drawings have been recast in novel avatars and placed in surroundings that reveal an effortless mix of the familiar and the exotic.
What is even more amazing is his eye for detail. Subramanyan was a keen observer of the wonders of nature and with a few strokes of his brush he could create the idyllic rural rows of palm trees in Kerala which he mentions in one of his essays, which remained the wellspring of his inspiration. Quickness and spontaneity are the fulcrum of his fecundity.
For most of the sketches and drawings Subramanyan has used ramie paper, a rustic grainy sheet with a greyish tone, on this subtle shade he uses a bright palette – golden yellow, orange, green, sky blue – it invigorates the dull backdrop. His works are peopled with hybrid characters, there are deities, and mythical creatures that come alive in the most unfamiliar and unorthodox situations and circumstances.
Subramanyan’s orchestration is one of opposites through the spaces his personalities inhabit: they could be lurid or sterile, lascivious or reticent. His characters spring from the abacus of hybrids in modern theatre - from cats to fisherwomen, courtesans to angels: mermaids to monarch like men; each character contained in a subtle wisdom. His brilliance lay in his ability to thread everyday life through sensibilities that were set in fantasy, beautiful long limbed women on a chaise lounge, angels and devilish demons on a wall, household animals acting as spirit familiars, everyday objects developing a new avtaar.
His knowledge of the Western and Eastern doctrines were woven into wit and satire to combine his portraiture of women. His palette of fantasy recalls great English poets – we could hark back to Eliot's poetry of dissatisfaction and anxiety, deceit and masquerade. The basic tenets of Subramanyan’s art lay between “vulnerability and inviolability, between the power of secrecy and the truth of exposure.” Through his multiple tableaux, he celebrates contradictions, and his drawings dwell on the magic of momentum in little creatures like the rooster, the goat, the power of conversation between men and women.
Seagull’s collection of doodles, scribbles, sketches, draw us into the tools used- ballpoint pen, brush and ink, crayons, alone or blended with colour or ink washes, and gouache. Rambling graphic devices ranging from marks, scrawls, calligraphic brush work, freehand flourishes, strokes and dabs – Subramanyan’s repertoire is refreshing despite being repetitive, and mesmerizing. Born out of myth as well as history it’s as if he wanted to know the world and to think his way through it. The viewer takes away poetry, playful perspectives and the poignancy of aesthetics. Subramanyan was the ultimate story teller who carried a stage within his psyche-where all the men and women were merely players and each one played many parts. This show is an apt epitaph.
(The show will run till August 27th at Aakriti Gallery, Lado Sarai.)
