Recently, while chatting with artist N. Ramachandran, I commented that artists in the South appeared to be less inclined to entail outside assistance and enjoyed working fairly independently. Rama told me how once he had been carefully packaging and transporting a work to a customer’s site, when a curator from Delhi visiting his studio queried, “Why Rama, don’t you have anyone to deliver your work?” Rama’s rebuttal was, “Would you hesitate to take your child to school?” The work is not just close to an artist’s heart, it holds a sacred space and Ramachandran emphasises, “I love watching Laxma Goud work, with that same deep intimacy.” Devotion to an art takes innumerable paths.
Kumaresan Selvaraj points out, “Worship can mean different things for different people. I have even seen stone-throwing as a form. For me, worship is alangaram.” Decorative trends have been a consistent characteristic of art of Chennai. In senior artist G. Raman’s work, his subjects are brought into an intricate geometric patterning. Raman’s subjects of worship and iconography have to be thought through as curator Jana Manuelpillai notes, “I have to work a lot of that out by researching about him and understanding.” In reputed artist Alphonso Doss’ work, there is this crystalline fragmentation like a chiselling of canvas. His early encounter with the effect of stained glass in a chapel led him to seek out his expression. This type of insistent bejewelling within the overarching subject is peculiar to Indian art, where motifs and symbols are all ensconced within the greater framework. Multiplicity is a unique facet of our art, the variations within the main thematic matter invested with symbols and decorative elements, each with its own origins of meaning. It is like the instance when Yashoda asks young Krishna eating mud to open his mouth and is filled with awe to see the entire universe within. We imagine Yashoda’s fear mixed with a profound astonishment — she has a revelation, and we do as well, of how many things exist together, manifestations of evil and good.
In the lively and enigmatic sculptures of S. Nandagopal, familiar symbols are placed in a new context, raising our curiosity. When asked about how he derives his symbology Nandagopal shuns any tendency to dissect meanings, inviting the viewer to participate as the object plays out its own narrative. He quotes art critic Clement Greenberg saying “.... finally it is the working of the work.” Specific associations with the cultural landscape and references made to symbols and icons get thrown into a new focus. How then does the work play out? What meanings do symbols have in changing times – a conch, a bow and arrow? They must somehow recall our deepest associations with primal elements. Young, serious and committed, Benitha Perciyal devotes much of her energy to pursuing the sacred in art as in ‘The Fires of Faith’ for Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2014. A careful sub-construction goes on, always relinquished to devotion. In Benitha’s work, one constantly recalls impressions that are etched in our subconscious — a halo of light over a bust or hands torn away from the effigy of Christ — scenes we may have seen in churches and altars, yet removed from those spaces to be relocated. It is these vestiges of associations that represent a deep longing, a need for the human psyche to complete the unfinished story. The missing lingers in the presence of memory, a scent of earth, a coming together of materials exotic as frankincense, myrrh, cloves, cinnamon and cedar wood, and as banal as cement.
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In ‘Accumulation’, Saravanan Parasuraman puts together ball bearings inspired by the forms of anthills. His work involved tediously and patiently pasting together hundreds of steel balls like ants labouring to build. His work refers to gathering, where our numerous actions and experiences come together in the shape of a form. The artist is searching for a quality which is untraceable, indefinable, ascribed to divinity, something unknown which hearkens in us awe and delight without a conscious reckoning. The separateness of elements, the renewed placement of symbols, through devoted practice, is brought together in unison - as do Benitha’s words, “I seem to be alone but I am not.”