Every few minutes, a violent crash of pottery breaks the silence at DakshinaChitra’s Varija Art Gallery. Unrelenting in its rhythm, persistent and precise, it’s the sort of sound that shocks you out of indifference and into rapt attention. Titled ‘Living while Existing’, this video installation of a pensive man intermittently dropping pots, by artist Narendran K., loops endlessly onto the Gallery’s wall and lends its name to this exhibition by the nine-member group, Karuppu Art Collective. Karuppu, for these artists, represents more than the mere colour black; it is the “moment before the light” that also reflects art’s ability to draw into itself numerous influences and thence create colour, writes academic A.S. Panneerselvan in an introduction to the group. Each artist, therefore, takes a step beneath the surface in their examination of the familiar, looking for the unusual in the everyday, and in a sense attempts living while existing.
The artists in the collective vary widely in seniority but are united by their roots in the Government College of Fine Arts, Chennai. “You can see how the ‘Madras line’ has travelled in time through all their works,” says Panneerselvan, although each artist traces their own path in terms of style and media. Narendran, for instance, experiments the most with media, ranging from papier-mâché in his installation ‘Vegetable of Wisdom’ that pokes quiet fun at the ‘isms’ of Dadaism, minimalism, and many more, to coin imprints in his piece ‘Impressions’. He works with text often, recasting the words in the emotions they invoke; for example, his piece ‘Fear’ is made of elephant dung on wood, an empty question mark emerging from the dark texture of the dung. Elephants fade in and out, at once depicting their existence in fear of mankind, as well as questioning our responsibility toward their conservation.
Michael Irudayaraj in turn uses mud, as terracotta and sand, in his elaborate installation on the Gallery’s floor ‘I lift my lids and all is born again’. Articles of domesticity, such as pots and pans, carts and animals, sculpted in terracotta are heaped into the shape of Michael’s body. “Our entire existence can be explained in the medium of mud. I don’t see much difference between our bodies and land,” he says. Michael uses his body in his second piece, too, that depicts a large bed made of crumpled balls of paper, each featuring a sketch of thoughts that appear in our sleep, with the impression of his body’s outline sunken into the bed. The thoughts we do acknowledge in our waking, are the ones he draws on the the bed itself.
It is this dance between the known and the unknown that Krishnapriya C.P. explores in her five sculptures and five canvases, collectively titled ‘Camouflage’. Each sculpture of a head corresponds to the adjoining canvas, and represents a different form of camouflage. From a zoomed-in print of a chameleon’s skin, to a pattern of tiger skin made from waste leather, Krishnapriya takes that which conventionally slips into hiding, and puts it into sharp focus. Her sculptures are painted with cosmetics and makeup, a choice of medium itself which speaks volumes in its traditional use for masking. In contrast, Sharmila Mohandas paints and sculpts bare-bodied women that interest her for their sheer beauty of anatomy, and for how the “female form simultaneously portrays both fragility and strength”. In one of her paintings, Sharmila’s woman is chained, and in another, jailed, but in her sculpture, she lies free, on a bed of roses.
Natesh Muthuswamy explores the idea of masculinity in his works, the first in a series of ink-on-paper drawings of the metamorphosis of sparrows, and in his installation of a gigantic egg placed above the picture of Damocles’ sword. The sparrows, for him, represent the less powerful in society, that are easily co-opted by ideas of the mighty, such as male solidarity, an equation he considers a “conspiracy”. Aparajithan Adimoolam asks similarly existential questions of the world in his painting of the sky, sea and shore that stand emblazoned with the words “Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going?” written in tablets. At once a post-modern tribute to Paul Gauguin’s work of the same title, the pills add emphasis to man’s ultimate mortality.
