Chennai-based artist Pravin Kannanur is showcasing his recent works at Amethyst. Curated by Ranvir Shah, the exhibition, titled “Tranceport”, is presented by the India Collective. Pravin comes from a theatre background and is the founder of Magic Lantern, a Chennai-based theatre group. His interest in art was evident from his school days, and his skills with the brush were honed under artist Bhagwan S. Chavan. Art nevertheless remained Pravin's focus, though theatre soon began to occupy him full-time.
Perspectives on life
The present series of works is premised on perceptions or perspectives on life. As they are open to interpretation, several meanings emerge from them. This is revealed through his engagement with three protagonists, the leitmotifs in his works, the boat, the dog and the crow. These elements are made heroic by Pravin. Compositionally, his works are an extension of his theatre experiences, which through their position and juxtaposition create dramatic diagonals that at once attract the eye.
The three protagonists are ubiquitous to the city of Chennai and are encountered in our daily lives. However, they are cleverly used as metaphors to convey life's trajectory — the eternal capsule or cycle of birth and death.
Visual symbols speak a language of their own. And the most powerful symbols are ironically the most common in our daily lives — things that we often take for granted, which influence us. The boats, a ubiquity on the Chennai beaches, have, in particular, been meaningfully engaged with as a concept relating to life; allegorising the journey of surprises, adventure, discovery and danger. The crow and the dog convey ominous feelings, further deepened by the eerie, surrealist stillness that pervades his paintings.
The power of Pravin's works emanates from his limited imagery and his theatrical skill in positioning them to advantage so that they strike the right chord in the viewer. Surprisingly, the crow flying in from the margin is not rendered in ominous black, directly correlating to darkness and death as commonly perceived, but semantically represented in blue to signify creation, transition, prophecy and trickery. Similarly, the semiotic operating for the dog — faithfulness, closeness, friendship and camaraderie — transform it into a signpost bearing affinities to human character, an analogy that humanises the animal.
Different viewpoints
A close scrutiny of Pravin's canvases reveals that his boats are rendered from different viewpoints, as though seen from above or below, the side or head-on. Such an approach underlines his philosophy which he reiterates: “I don't believe in a single reality, neither do I think that what you usually see is what you get. There's always a deeper truth, if you look closely.” Hence his pictorial devices correlate with his concepts.
Short strokes
Technically, the rendering of the boats is done as a series of small, consistent, short strokes that has echoes of the tribal Gond tradition of Madhya Pradesh. The short, broken strokes, that gestalt to the form of the boat, could philosophically refer to the transitory nature of life, which is eternally on a journey. It is this poignancy, poetically evoked in his works that lends them a quiet dynamism.
Pravin's works also convey a strong sense of design, emanating partially from his involvement with the stage, judiciously balanced with a plain or visually-textured background so as not to distract from the main elements placed on the stage of his pictorial space. There are nevertheless oppositions and duality which offer variety such as the rendering of the crow and the dog in a mottled technique of flowing tones and colours.
The show is on at Amethyst at its new address on Whites Road, next to Corporation Bank, Royapettah, till April 10.
