Turning and turning in the widening gyre...
The opening line of WB Yeats’ Second Coming rings in my head as I walk around the InKo Centre gallery, which is laden with canvases of spirals; of different titles, intensities and colours. Right now, they are masked with plastic sheets and on the floor lies an unfinished work; a ‘widening gyre’ in progress.
Artist Pravin Kannanur’s series Core, is not only meant for static walls — it also evolves through performance, suggests the half finished spiral on the floor. Only a few days ago did he create one of the works impromptu, to the background of saxophonist Maarten Visser’s music where he, along with performing artistes chalked out the piece through movements, covered predominantly in grey: sometimes paints were splashed straight from the tubes or smeared on to the empty canvas with their palms and feet. Almost Pollockian in technique.
All the works represent the different facets of the ‘core’, as the title suggests — but the varying degrees of progression of the spirals speak differently to different people, he tells me. There are the ones which grab one’s attention as they walk in, leading them to introspect almost instantly; and there are others that absorb you in a much slower pace. The colours play a major role in this and it doesn’t stop with one reading, as Pravin suggests. There is beauty in the chaos. For the artist, every piece in this series is the product of an epiphany — “Abstraction is my native language. This series started quite strangely when four years back, a friend wanted a series for his corporate office. As I was working on it, the idea of a spiral or a centre grew stronger. This led me to approach these works as a dramaturgist,” says Pravin.
The fact that he is also a practising theatre aided this process — for him, both art and theatre are simultaneous processes, the main approach in both being that of improvisation.
Even while improvising, a lot of research went behind the process. “I started reading up and reading into the images for context. I also stumbled upon the Fibonacci series. In fact, this progression is seen everywhere around us — be it in a conch, or a cyclone, you see the spiral. These are somewhere in the underlay of the works.”
The environment plays an integral role in the making of a work and Pravin, by his own admission, lets the atmosphere take control in deciding the different elements that will be at play. “I work on a terrace and I look over a canopy of things. I am constantly struck by the colours and structures that I see around,” he says, whipping out his phone to show me a picture that set the context. It’s a cross section of a tree — shot from below, the frame captures the light green canopy of the tree, with its branches spread out, almost like the spokes of a wheel. The series is still in progression. “I sometimes let the sky tell me. The setting sun, the crackling of dawn... all of them are part of this process,” he says. For instance, one of the works titled Amitabh is “the light that dispels the darkness of ignorance,” and displays a gradation in mustard and its darker shades, the earthy orange centre being the onus. The circles are sometimes fragmented, and seep in and out of the other elements in the canvas. These fragmented lines subvert notions of purity — “It conveys disillusionment.”
And, how does he arrive at titles like Amitabh, Luz and Inscape? They are most often added “post-factum”, sometimes after long periods of staring at the finished work at different points of time, Pravin concludes laughingly.
Core, an exhibition of abstract paintings, will be open till September 24 at The Gallery@InKo Centre, Adyar Club Gate Road, from 10 am to 6 pm. Situating the Abstract, a debate that examines the cultural legacy of abstraction across South Asia, led by Pravin Kannanur and co-curated by anthropologist Dr Mathangi Krishnamurthy, will be held today at 6.30 pm.
