There is no other natural pigment which represents the level of mystery that indigo has. So deeply blue that it appears almost black sometimes. Temperamental in nature, its luminousness differs through the day, going from a certain brightness in sunlight to an aloofness at night.
Consider its omnipresence in cultures stretching from Egypt to Mexico, going back thousands of years. There is so much that is yet to be understood about this colour, but to work with natural indigo is to understand that this is a colour you must bend to, rather than the other way around.
Artist Abishek Ganesh J. understands this wilful hue well enough, having handled it throughout his works. And it is the subject of his new solo, titled The Divine Blue, at Kaash Foundation’s space in Bengaluru.
A trained textile designer, Ganesh has been working under the artist identity, Kaimurai, which in Tamil means ‘method of hand’, for the past four years. It is an apt name for an artist whose work is entirely about drawn forms. Some strokes are repetitive and energetic, while others twist like a Mobius strip. In some, the indigo seems to rise towards an imagined climax, while in others the strokes are meditative, and pulsating with a latent energy. It makes sense that music forms an integral part of Ganesh’s creative process. “There are three elements that trigger my work,” he says. “Material, which is natural indigo, organic forms (real of fantasised) and Carnatic music.”
All of Ganesh’s works are on handloom textile, paper, or canvas. When you consider that materiality with the omnipresence of his work, the collection seems like a bridge between handicraft and contemporary art. At Kaash, the works are presented alongside vats of indigo in the outdoors, while inside the gallery, the central installation is a series of fluid textiles rising and falling like a cadence. Despite the scale of the installation and some of the other works in this exhibition, Ganesh is very much a soloist, working alone in his small studio in Bengaluru.
The forms on Ganesh’s works are abstract but also soulful and energetic, an impression created both by the precision of the artist’s strokes as much by the mood and depths of the colour. “Indigo for me is like vibuthi or kumkuma, a spiritual pigment which represents a deep meditative space and has no form. In this interaction between the physical material and metaphysical ideas, my hands seem take control over my mind creating repeated markings, a method which renders the artwork,” he says of his process. Abishek’s works, the result of this deeply intentioned process, have already found quite a few fans, making its way into collections across the country.
‘The Divine Blue’ is on at Kaash in Bengaluru till December 18, 2022. Follow @kaashfoundation for more information.
The writer is the editor of beautifulhomes.com.
