The artist’s house is quaint, decorated with objects that the owners care about. Books line Ganesh Selvaraj’s walls; there are several on woodworking and furniture, confirming his love for working with his hands.
Selvaraj’s experiments with art are overwhelming in the discovery of surfaces. The first piece he shows me called ‘Perspectives’, glimmers like a dissected hologram. 3D stickers from Parry’s Corner are cut in strips to painstakingly collage a psychedelic geometric construction. His experiments with varied materials and forms, both organic and synthetic, lean to a type of constructivism. “If we look at it closely, it can be called abstract design,” says Selvaraj. But then, he argues, “If I have derived it from something, how can it be called abstract?”
At the centre of the room is a latticework cast of a hammerhead shark, a fragile and brittle construction in brass. It is not the whole fish, but a part of it, exploring the skin as a shell. “I wanted to show that what we think as ‘inside’ could well be ‘outside.’ When I say ‘front of the shark’, it depends on what I see as the front.” These matters of perception are obviously based in the way we ascribe and assign systems, so that we can relate to each other on common ground. But without knowledge of the system, what one man sees can be quite different from another. Selvaraj holds up a scaled-down mock-up for an installation made with diagonal strips of glass. The final installation commissioned by Rajeev Sethi for the Mumbai International Airport uses 3000 strips of glass and weighs 9 tonnes. At a certain angle, an image can be seen, at another it vanishes like a mirage. With his tenacious visual arts practice, Selvaraj constantly attempts to tease us with such optical illusions. He says, “Art is not a skill or practice, it is a state of mind.”
From a variegated series of early organic compositions, Selvaraj moved to more decisive geometric forms. He constructs “elements in space” as in his work with Polaroid negatives along a bottom row and kuzhi karandi (ladles) on the top row.
The concave reflecting surface of the ladles mirror a person upside down juxtaposed against the subject’s impression on Polaroid. “Any form of composition is construction,” he says.
A Charles Wallace Scholarship in 2004 gave Selvaraj the opportunity to study printmaking at Edinburgh Printmakers in the U.K. He went to a painting studio in France, an artist’s studio in Berlin and also worked for a year in London. His stay abroad taught him to work with discipline and safety in a printmaking studio, respectful of materials and tools. Selvaraj would set aside half-an-hour for just cleaning up after making his prints. His art is often a laborious process. In one series, he uses 3000 to 4000 triangles. Paper and print magazines are folded and jewel-boxed. Hundreds of tiny strips are collated side by side. Like endless equations in mathematics, Selvaraj presents multiple arguments laid out on grids, varying patterns and colours.
Collecting blood samples from many people on one canvas, he concludes, “Many contribute to my environment.” A large fuzzy blue ball with electric fibres may be a microscopic view of seeds germinating or a faraway explosion in the universe, a seed of cosmic proportions or the Milky Way. “Seed can be a thought. Seed can be a person; from one dimension to many.”
(Chennai Canvas links art to design and culture through an inside look at the city)
