A group show featuring a variety of genres, styles and media gets under way at Auroville from Saturday.
Hosted by Centre d’Art, Auroville, ‘Emptiness’ showcases paintings by E. Ezhilarasan, B. Vengatesh, S. Danasegar and K. Sridar at the Centre d’Art, Citadines. The show is on till January 28.
According to organisers, what drives the artists is a desire to capture the messages of the invisible —— to become the vectors of a world to which we have no access, rarefying in their work the elements of distraction and uncovering latent mysteries beneath the surface of things.
For Ezhilarasan and Vengatesh, who tirelessly return to the places they are fascinated by, respectively the Himalayas and Varanasi, it is also a metaphorical journey with shifts of consciousness.
Danasegar decides to empty himself and go deep within, letting his hand trace signs on the surface of the canvas that he refuses to control, and become “the water flowing through the pebbles...the line..” and be freed from his existence.
Each artist bears inside a wealth of knowledge, memories and sensory experiences which are essential to his/her artistic evolution. But sooner or later, freed from the bonds of the past, the artist feels the need to get rid of that baggage and to reach into new, unexplored regions.
Sridhar’s father was an artist, and from the temple of his childhood he kept memories of marvels and an absolute devotion for the masterpieces he could admire throughout India, and make his own - the sculptures, the bas reliefs, the frescoes by Ellora and Ajanta.
The echoes from this prodigiously ancient world continue to filter through his porous-looking stratigraphies, like those of a mural.
Common thread
The common thread that connects the four artists from the city, rather like the underground river where their journeys meet, may be found in the sculptures of Ezhilarasan, portraying a group of nine small studies of human beings caught in the familiar positions of common daily life, which the artist calls the nine planets.
The gallery hours are 11.00 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. (barring Sundays).
