Artists Gallery 1.
These pages are a virtual Kerala Artists Gallery, where we share with you the beautiful works of these South Indian painters and sculptors. A number of these miniature panels appeared over the years on our Facebook page following exchanges with the artists. We will keep expanding this space to introduce you to the many other talents. This is not a commercial page, and so if you are interested in their works you should contact them or their representatives directly. In case you don’t find them ask us.
We are continuously updating and expanding, so do return. Click on the thumbnails for a larger view; best viewed on large screen.
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- Raja Ravi Varma
- K.M.V.Namboothri
- Kanai Kunhiraman
- Velu Vishvanadhan
- Dethan B.D.
- K.P.Krishnakumar
- T.Kaladharan
- Johns Mathews
- Tensing Joseph
- Rajan Krishnan
- Rimzon Nedumgottil
- Hareendran T.K.
- Bhagyanath Chandroth
- Murali Cheeroth
- Shibu Natesan
- Sajitha Shankar
- Binoy Varghese
- Rathidevi Panicker
- K.T.Mathai
- Tom Vattakuzhy
- T.V.Santhosh
- Zakir Hussein
- CG Prince
- Nijeena Neelambaram
- Sosa Joseph
- Dinesh P.G.
- Madhu Venugopalan
- Sumedh Rajendran
- Shijo Jacob
- Gigi Scaria
- Shinod Akkaparambil
- S.N.Sujith
- Anil Thambai
- Ratheesh T.
- Sajeev Visweswaran
- Gipin Varghese
- Sukesan Kanka
- Siji Krishnan
- Jalaja P.S.
- Sara Hussain
Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906)
Raja Ravi Varma was a famous Kerala painter and artist. His works are held to be among the best examples of the fusion of European techniques with a purely Indian sensibility. Some of these are shown here along with the painting Kadambari was done with his brother Raja Raja Varma. Read more about him here. RRV
Image source: Wikipedia
Kanai Kunhiraman.
Kanayi Kunhiraman is a sculptor from Kerala, who had studied in Chennai (Tamil Nadu, South India) and at the Slade School in London, UK. 50 years ago Kanayi sculpted the then controversial huge concrete sculpture of a nude woman “Yakshi” in the Malampuzha Dam gardens in the Palakkad district. Objections were raised about showing a nude in a public place (not in temples & temple walls as is frequent in India). He has created many sculptures in concrete and bronze, some quite abstract, in various places in Kerala, a few of which are shown here. Kanayi has also turned to sculpting words.
Read some press releases about him here: KK1, KK2, KK3, KK4
Velu Viswanadhan
Born in 1940 in Kerala, abstractionist painter and film maker, Viswanadhan is based in Paris (since 1968) Chennai (Cholamandal Artist’s Village). Besides India, Viswanadhans work has been shown in Paris, Germany, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Italy, Korea, Japan, USA etc.
Read more about him here: VV1.
Dethan B.D.
Paintings by Kerala artist B.D.Dethan. Images courtesy of the artist.
Dethan’s vision of the world :
“ This is not the golden era of humanity or nature. People’s worlds have shrunk to themselves. We are promoting a culture where one is eating oneself. I am scared of the democracy, the world, the people. I am scared of everything around me. So this is my fight against our current condition” . … About his painting styles in various series of paintings- “… I don’t stick to a particular style. I believe that the artists should have a strong base before they jump into an abstract style. I can draw an extremely realistic image with as much skill as an abstract image”. Excerpts from the City Express, 2014
See more of his work abstract , realistic & surrealistic works at: www.bddethan.com
Johns Mathews
Some paintings of Kerala artist Johns Mathews.
Top left clockwise: Exercise of Lies series, Life After Flood, Exercise of Lies series, Exercise of Lies series, Tree of Kerala, Ritual in a Cat Eye.( Images courtesy JohnsM.)
About Johns works in his words:
“I’ll try to describe why I paint in few lines.
Painting is a way to reflect my way of looking at the world around me.
Art as a medium of social reflection. I work in various mediums from water colour, oil, acrylic, marble and granite. Nature, Human and all other species characteristics interweave a visual description of the surrounding of my life.”
You can find more about him here:
https://bit.ly/2UyimcE
https://johnsmat.blogspot.com
http://johns-mathew.blogspot.com
Tensing Joseph (b.1962, Kerala)
Tensing Joseph, a Kerala artist, is concerned about the plight of working class people- peasants, the effect people have on their environment, while building various installations (like an airport) or using pesticides in agriculture; he questions why works from the field of humanities and science are not equally celebrated. You can read some articles about his work and recent exhibitions here: TJ1 and TJ2 .(Images courtesy of the artist).
An excerpt of his artist statement from vamartinc.com :
“ I view my art and the process of art making primarily from the basis of the genuine need for self-expression, and all other things which help to make my art relevant and true to the circumstance I leave, come up quite naturally along with the attempts I make to see myself living in a social, in culture, and in economy. Therefore these three things always considered, and the result these three things bring on life and realized which I work. But above all, at present my considerations are more or less with the linguistic innovations and new learning and relearning from the historical past and contemporary present. Whenever I think of a composition, first I think of materials and there placement in a supposed space, in an environment where are seen, being arranged and rearranged; sometimes removed and sometimes replaced. And the world outside is full of things different nature, of different quality, of different weight, colour, taste and so on. This understanding has helped me to experiment with different quality of materials and their importance in an aesthetical space when they are arranged and rearranged. And this arrangement of things, made of different materials ,at times arises many questions regarding their identity and purpose of coexisting or regarding the conflict of caused by them. My predilection for organic form born of a native life-affirming scene of maturing and regeneration, has found a congenial and engorging environment in the atmosphere of Santiniketan (Visva-Bharati University, formulated by RavindranathaTogre, West Bengal, India) where I completed my post-graduation in sculpture…..”
Rajan Krishnan (Kerala, India. 1967-2016).
Some paintings over last years.To quote him about his later work:
“My paintings are often described as depicting a post-human landscape where traces of human activity and presence have almost been entirely lost in what has come about after. I live and work in Kerala and have been influenced heavily by the surroundings I have grown up in – I use the landscape and the elements around me to construct a psychological landscape. For me, landscape is filtered through personal and collective memory – of change, of time passing and of loss. These works often have a dark, desolate atmosphere to them but it is also important to look for signs of emerging life – a fish in the river perhaps or a bird appearing suddenly in the grove.”
TK Hareendran (b.1961, Kerala, India)eHareendran is a Kerala artist, who is also the founding member of the Indian Radical Sculptors Association. Besides paintings Hareendran does photography and short films. The panel of his paintings shown here from his recent “Shore of Alphabets” show. Harrendran supplied us this description by Rahul Bhattacharya. (Images courtesy of the artist; click to enlarge).
“Sitting by the Shore of Alphabets
TK Hareendran’s works come to me as a continuous endeavour to save the artist’s ‘happy conscience,’ entirely based on the internal consistency of his work, realized within the experimental limits of language, poised against the negative inconsistency of the world. Today, it is rare to see art that accepts the possibility of putting subjectivity at the intersection of all. This crossing also means not mythicizing one’s self, but rather inserting the self onto a collision course with other expressive possibilities thereby blending inside the crucible of the work both private and mythic images, personal signs tied to cultural and art history. The initial precept is that of art as the production of a catastrophe, a discontinuity that destroys the tectonic balance of language to favor a precipitation into the substance of the personal imagery, neither as a nostalgic return, nor a reflux, but a flowing that drags inside itself the sedimentation of many things which exceed a simple return to the private and the symbolic.
Hareendran paints at a time when the world is entangled in a series of crises stripping the productivistic giddiness of all of its ideological systems. Finally, talk has been heard and is still being made of a crisis in art. However, if by the crisis we intend, according to the etymon, ‘breaking point’ and ‘verification,’ then we can use the word as a permanent angulation to verify the real stuff of art. The definition of crisis in art refers to two levels: the death of art and the crisis of the evolution of art. The religious system of ideologies, of psychoanalytic and scientific hypotheses, tends to transform all that is different into something functional to the system, recycling and converting into terms of functional and productive all that is instead rooted in reality. Hareendraan’s works are like hierographic embeddings by an artist working on individual research that shatters social taste and pursues the finality of the work itself. The value of individuality, of working by oneself, is contrary to a social system crossed by superimposed totalitarian systems, political ideology, psychoanalysis and the sciences, all of which resolve the antinomies and swerves, produced in the forward movement of reality, inside their own viewpoints, their own projects.
The shattering of the work means shattering the myth of the unity of the ego, assuming the nomadism of a non-stop personal imagery without anchorage or reference points. Through the years Hareendran held on to, explored and nourished the possibility of making the work clear through the presentation of an image which is simultaneously enigma and solution. In this way art loses its nocturnal and problematic side, its pure inquiry, in favor of a visual clarity which means the possibility of realizing works well-made, in which the work really functions as a “gaze-tamer,” in the sense that it tames the restless glance of the spectator, used to the avant-garde’s open work, the planned incompleteness of an art which needs the spectator’s intervention to be brought to perfection. Every work becomes a vicissitude carrying and returning to the place of work, crossing multiple fields of reference, using every utensil, a manual capability oriented by the grace of color and of many mediums, a thinker who thinks directly through images and crouches down to the bottom of vision, like a temperature which acts as an adhesive, allowing the work’s fragments to maintain a mobile relationship which is never bolted and never seeks shelter in the idea of unity.
In the ‘Shore of Albhabets’, no divine rule exists — only the creative practice of an art which stabilizes all precariousness without transforming it into stabilization and symbolic fixity. The work preserves the flow of its process, of its being active on the outskirts of a subjectivity which never tends to become exemplary but rather preserves the character of an accident, of an opening in a field — not the avant-garde’s romantic intoxication with the infinite, but moving without a center along drifts marked by a unique perspective: mental and sensorial pleasure”.
Rahul Bhattacharya
Murali Cheeroth (b. 1966, Kerala)
Murali Cheeroth, is a painter and at times performance artist who works in Bangalore. His vividly colorful art reflects concerns about the rapid development of Indian society, the underlying sociological aspects and sometimes ensuing violence.
Murali has exhibited in various countries including UK, Austria, Canada, China, Abu Dhabi, India etc.. An artist statement kindly sent us along with some images in the picture:
“My working process is a kind of extraction system, that draws on tiny concerns about uber urbanization, frenzied globalization and the visual/virtual stimulation therein, and folds and unfolds them into another reality to simplify their characteristics and relationships in order to build a new visual experience that is clear and vivid”.
Find out more about C. Murali at muralicheeroth.com and here: Artnet, Initialaccess, Triva
Sajitha Shankar. (b1967, Kerala).
Some works from dfferent series of paintings, by Sajitha Shankar a Kerala artist working in Thiruvananthapuram (Trivandrum) over a period from about 1993 to now. Sajitha also runs the Gowry Art Institute (Thiruvananthapuram), for inter-disciplinary studies in art and a place for artists to meet. In her words, from her art catalogue “Stree” (woman):
My earlier works something strongly to me regarding the potential of women. Many women who have given away too much of themselves talk of recovering their losses, of recovering their earlier freedom, and surprisingly enough, though I began my work with a strong bias towards women. I gradually discovered that men were also victims of the same system they had created… and at a point it was difficult to differentiate between men and women as victors and victims of a vicious system that had influenced the human psyche over a long period of time.
My work known for bearing within them the traces of my lifes journey, but in this expressions I undertake a far more conscious journey into my innerself – into the secret corridors carved by life’s incessant chisel. Past a period of intense disharmony between the inner and outerselves, these days evoke a certain clarity that reminds one of the clean lights that streams down from the clean, freshly washed sky, into a bright dustless world after a heavy stormy down pour. These unfold in moments of intense self-reflection, when my questions sail along the streams of my inner, self, to discover hidden recesses which I have been taught to ignore or forget. In these little hiding places, I find buried treasures – memories of other women, their unique energies, their intuition, in sight.”
Her works have been exposed in various solo & group shows in Austria, France, Spain, Germany, Uk Japan, India etc;
You can found more about her here :
— with Sajitha Shankar.
Dinesh Shenoy.
Dinesh Shenoy’s specialises in sepia tone art. DS uses a home made concoction of betel juice and lime to produce his paint. He tends to specialise in paintings of old buildings of Kochi.
Find more of his artworks here: http://on.fb.me/Xgu7hO
Rathidevi Panicker. (b 1964, Kerala)
This is the “Password” series of paintings by Rathidevi Panicker. She talks about amongst other ..” the increasing concealment of the Body, especially the Female Body” ..and the not so distant different past. Read her description of this work below.
About her : RP
MASK/UN-MASK[Password]. The veiled face,that my Password series had as its leitmotif, came to me through its alarmingly frequent presence in mass media -especially 24 x 7 ‘breaking news stories’ about sex rackets and human trafficking of various dimensions,moral policing and various forms of living terror. The mask-like veil is one of those contradictory culminations of precisely the very same ‘progressive’ processes of social reform that ushered in modernity , whose agenda also strangely deemed necessary the increasing concealment of the Body,especially the Female Body. The history of social reform of my own home state Kerala, is itself a much debated complex text and a testimony to this…. As I looked at these old sepia photographs ,these women look back at me unveiled,unabashed and without a trace of coyness. I have juxtaposed a collage of their images on either side of the masked/veined figure without nostalgia , as a source of hope ,a reminder of the possibility of another order ,another way of being that existed even as recently as the life time of my own maternal grandmother….
“Self Portrait [Dialoguing with Damayanti]” My long dialogue with Ravi Varma’s love lorn, gentle Damayanti listening to her beloved’s message of love through the snow white swan transmuted into this enigmatic figure …which is a self portrait of sorts.A self cast almost as if in the role of a new Damayanti in a new ,somewhat disquieting context of relationality ,mediation and communication…Yet even as the menacing bejewelled cloth of my PASSWORD series that conceals and perhaps even effaces personal identity falls upon my face ,the white swan, the winged messenger of Love refuses to fly away … Instead it stubbornly chooses to remains even if only as an applique design finding its position tenderly upon that part of the cloth which swathes and covers the mouth … My dialogue with Damayanti is not bereft of Hope …
(you can see the Ravi Varma work here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damayanti)
“There comes pappa” . Ravi Varma’s paintings have been subjects of prolonged engagement for me because of which I keep revisiting them . Here I have chosen the significant painting “There comes Papa”. The title is almost like a blurb of the aristocratic voluptuous upper caste young woman in the picture who gestures gracefully towards the viewer as if pointing out to the child on her hip who his father is.The inclusion of a pedigreed pet dog in the frame is a clear indication of the class she hails from. I find it sardonically amusing as to how with a single gesture that the ‘absent’ father in Kerala’s once matrilineal and matriarchal culture ,becomes suddenly an ubiquitous and all pervadingly significant presence. The bejeweled cloth covering the face in my ‘Password’ series that stems from a real life episode I happened to see once on TV news when a man tried to cover his face against the news camera using the brocade sari end of the woman he was caught with for ‘immoral trafficking’, returns here also….But this time it falls on the aristocratic beauty who is bathed in a strange ethereal metallic sort of light hiding her seductive face. The child on her hip is fitted with a golden mask that stands between him and the out -of frame ‘father’ whose place we have all been forced to take. Even the innocent dog now has a glazed robotic glow in his scanning eyes, wears a bomb squad style high tech gear on his head and is positioned like a high risk category security guard.The placement of this hitherto invisible father on such a high pedestal has indeed had its effects on our contemporary collective life!”
K.T.Mathai.(b.1967, Kerala)
KT Mathai is a painter from Cochin (Kerala); His paintings reflect his preoccupation about man’s negative influence on nature. The paintings here come from three series. (Images Courtesy K.T. Mathai)
Climacterics
The ‘Climacterics’ series was started in 2006. It deals with land and water exploitation that affects the nature and life of villages like mine. Everyday life is set against exploited landscapes with churches standing witness in silent lament. The word ‘Climacterics’ means a critical and barren stage without any fertility or productivity.
‘Imbalanced’
A continuation of the ‘Climacterics’ series. It brings in a new metaphor – acrobatic figures shown as balanced amidst an imbalanced landscape. Modern man claims that his development is balanced. But the more balanced he claims, the more unmoored he becomes, amidst more and more imbalanced nature and imbalanced mindsets. The name itself reflects this paradox – “I am balanced” and “Imbalanced”. Man becomes more and more unmoored and uprooted as nature is exploited steadily. A new theme of profound solitude also comes in.
‘Nobody’s séance’
This series is also in continuous flow with the previous work. It explores the pollution and environmental mutilation of India’s sacred rivers. As the name suggests, a bleak landscape where nobody tries to recreate anything that is no more.
Tom Vattakuzhy (b.1967, Kerala).
Here are some paintings by what Tom Vattakuzhy. (Images courtesy Tom Vattakuzhy). Tom gave us a short statement about his artworks (find more about him here):
“The inspiration and images for my paintings come from my everyday life experiences, my surroundings, memories, books, poetry etc.They come to me infused with a feel, and I follow it. I think a painting is not something that can be transcribed into words; it is more to be felt and experienced. However, broadly speaking, my works address issues of life, faith and humanity in today’s globally influenced and technologically advancing era of post truth.”
“…..My work is not intentionally political. It is an investigation about the angst and despair that continues to persist. Almost like a “butterfly effect,” which signifies one small incident that eventually turns out to be a larger catastrophe. Like an endless cycle of revenge, where religion, power, knowledge and hatred is involved. Although I am not religious in a conventional way, I am interested in some kind of mystical energy. I don’t think that one must succumb to the accepted notions of its conventions or exploit it for power. I look at religion in a more humanistic way — and my life in an eclectic way. I still believe in the relevance of Marxism, its pure intentions where equality and human rights become essential components of society. In order to understand the language and elements in my work, one has to apply the same worldview. I don’t limit myself to a rigid framework of understanding, and therefore my work keeps changing every few years….”
“…..Initially, my work was more monochromatic. The gradual transition to bright colors is merely an extension of what I was doing before, or rather, it is an area that I could not explore in my previous phase. My monochromatic works were almost like looking at historic pages, trying to find the implications of violence and war. War and terrorist activities can be viewed at many levels. One man’s hero is another’s enemy. When I depict something that happened in history, I connect it to what is happening now. There was a period between the monochrome and color works when a crucial shift occurred with the use of the photographic negative. It made me realize the possibility of juxtaposing the positive and the negative. Hence I did not see a need for the diptych: I merged the elements of positive and negative in one canvas. It is like looking at the same issue, differently. How the media projects reality is an integral part of my work. My linguistic and philosophic aspects are inseparably intertwined with the possibility of exploring the local and the global through photographic negatives. Local elements like faces become obscure in a negative. Hidden implications are encoded within the negative. And if you make it positive, it is automatically decoded. Fear, Nation and False Promises (2004), a title of one painting, can connect us with historical, social and political references. Although the original image comes from the Iraq War, it could be anywhere. False promises are made; truth is manipulated and nationhood is questioned. And the idea of animosity is manipulated by the system as propaganda…..”
C.G.Prince.(b.1961, Kerala)
Some make sculptures out of pots and pans, some out of marble or bronze,
CG Prince, who besides painting, film making and internal designing, makes these cool bird sculptures out of forks, knives, spoons etc….See more on his FB page and read here.
Zakkir Hussein. (b.1970, Kerala)
Read the artist statement sent by Zakkir below. (Images courtesy Zakkir Husein)
“What I want to explore is the possibility of an art practice within the bounds of a system in which reality is always a preordained subject that imposes itself on life. To expose the real hidden by this already programmed reality. I take recource to the conjoining of banal images (eg: trees, birds, male and female body parts, houses). What happens in truth is not a metamorphosis of these images- instead, I work with the visual chemistry effected by this grafting together of something like the stump of a tree, birds, house , partial human torso or some other conflicting image. These conjoined imageries are used deliberately to indicate some discarded, hidden situations and aspects of reality. The repetition of certain images (tree, bird) in my paintings may be read by a viewer generally as related to environmental issues, but this does not appear to be adequate to me. Ecological issues are related to the totality of life. The complexity of human life cannot be reduced to any singular aspect. I think that the problems that are reflected in the environment are part of the complexities in the social and inner aspects of man that he has to face. I use such images to mark the violence that man unleashes against man.”
Nijeena Neelambaram
Here are some works of Kerala artist Nijeena Neelambaran spanning a period of around twenty years.
Nijeena dedicates her works to women who resist defiantly the extremisms of our times. She paints, and in the last few years has been creating embossed inkless prints which in her words: “deals with the reciprocal influence of history and memory. …… The embossed inkless prints capture and isolate a fixed moment’s concern, a sense of continual transformation of unknown fears of a woman in society. “
(Images courtesy of the artist.)
Dinesh P.G. (b.1972, Kerala)
Here are some recent paintings of PG Dinesh in what he calls his pop-surrealistic style. Here is what he says:
My working methodology is very intuitive. There are no preparatory drawings or sketches but intuition governs the forms and characters that take up the space on my canvas. A conditioned quality of emotions, expressing varied messages is bought forth to my canvas filtered through many parameters that are either my surroundings that I have internalized through time or a comment on the external reality that affects me or on which I would like to use my art to present a narrative based commentary.
I have tried to absorb various experiences from life to translate them into a process that helps me generate the context for my art. From creating cartoons and illustrations for children’s books to painting on wooden boxes, since I came from a family of carpenters, each of these experiences have added a dimension to the layered meaning of my art. Creating a world of fiction through illustration for children, I feel, translated into a satire and sarcasm that I could convey through morphed imagery of beings. Each being that I create to be a protagonist or an actor on my stage [canvas] is identifiable in parts but as a whole remains an alien to the viewer. The identification of the parts leads the viewer on a quest to know why the morphing has taken place, why the head is not on the right body. This quest is the dialogue that is my primary intent; the interaction and the questioning by the viewer. This interaction and interpretation, the to and fro camaraderie between my theatre and the viewer puts life into the actors, the morphed beings of my reality.
The morphed heads, the non-human yet human bodied creatures are also used to depict the non-reality of our surrounding. The satire of the posing family, the mockery made of the mythological past. I do not give human heads but those of animals, for nobody is really true to himself. Many times I represent the many facets of one persona through multiple non-being beings on the canvas, sometimes being introspective I represent the multiple facets of me.
The theatre is set to project the personal idiosyncrasies, generalizing mythology and creating provocative settings for known idioms in religion and culture. There is a surreal quality that I try and induce into my art only to exaggerate the satire and sarcasm, the feel of the unreal and the narrative through a moment in time.
Madhu Venugopalan.
Some works by a Kochi (Kerala) artist Madhu Venugopalan from his series “Re-Assurance” and “Vernacular / Suspended “. You can see more of these on his page .
Sumedh Rajendran.
Some works of Kerala born, Delhi based artist Sumedh Rajendran, combining various forms, done in media such as graphite charcoal and leather or wood, leather & metal etc. See more of his works and read about him here.
Shijo Jacob
Have a look at the work of Kerala artist Shijo Jacob. Shijo Jacob’s paintings and installations, reflect his preoccupation about the way rural India is changed by the rapid expansion of cities, & development of specialized economic zones at the expense of villages- brutally uprooting villagers, leaving them destitute and lonely and adversely affecting the existing culture… (Images courtesy Shijo Jacob).
Read his words about this:
“The images that from an essential part of my visual lexis have been accrued over the years, and can be traced back to days preceding my art education – to days prior to my becoming an artist. On a visual plane, the power exerted over me by geographic diagrams / maps have been primarily because of its form – the crisscross formations always attracting me with its tight interrelation between the parts.
Another facet that influenced me was the political messages that were trapped within the diagrams / maps / plans. Maps often suggest colonization, power and dominance – where ousting the weak, the true heirs of the land, the powerful dominate over terrains which do not rightfully belong to them. In times preceding, where the landscape once dotted the expanse of a traditional village with a culturally rich people, now stand towns, cities, colonies and industries which loom menacingly over the populace, having wiped out every trace of a pre-existing culture. In the name of development (?) – lands have been seized and transformed into cities, into centers of power, into seemingly favorable dispensers of a growing economy, into educational establishments, all the while uprooting the culture, memories, beliefs and customs, and natural myths and origins of a ‘natural’ people born and bred on this earth. The ‘small people’ – the settlers of this land, are forcefully ‘displaced’ from their space/place and ‘mis-placed’ onto alien soil, and that which was ‘ours’ becomes ‘theirs’, and with it, sounds the death knoll of a rich historical culture that belonged to the land. These village dwellers are geographically, physically, economically and politically displaced / relocated in favour of the establishment of powerful. These forms relay the ideas and thoughts of displacement and misplacement, of unfavorable relocations recurring in our daily times which lead to a forced transformation of not the land alone, but also the people who tries to acclimatize according to the altering times. Displacement continues as a vicious cycle where replacing the old, new settlements are formed constantly, and in time that which was once ‘new’ awaits the same fortune.
Sizeable areas of lands are acquired and converted into specialized zones. With a view to promote large investments, the Government has marked and segregated certain areas and converted it into Special Economic Zones, zones which promise a booming economy. But the tragic irony lies in the fact that these investments are made on the backs of poor farmers, from whom their farmlands, that have been handed down to them through generations, are been forcefully acquired by powerful and tyrannical and cunning means, thereby snatching from them the sole means of food and livelihood. By stamping underfoot, the voices of these underprivileged, sacrificing the lives of thousand farmers, the powerful, amass wealth backed by the support of the Government. These farmers are ousted from their settlements and from their farm lands, losing all sense of their existence.
For this exhibition I am trying to make a painting and a small installation in connection the memory of my village.
SHIJO JACOB”
Gigi Scaria
Gigi Scaria is an artist from Kerala now based in Delhi. He paints, sculpts, does photography and video. His work shown here reflects on the the rapid chaotic growth of Indian cities and the stark differences between the haves and have-nots. He muses on fancy housing versus slums; social prejudice and class attitudes. (Images courtesy Gigi Scaria).
Here are a few words about the artist, suggested by him (extract from the essay by Satyanand Mohan titled The Archaeology of Urban Life).
“It would not be an exaggeration to call Gigi Scaria an ‘archaeologist’ of urban spaces, more particularly in his case that of the city of Delhi, where he has been living now for the better part of a decade. ‘Archaeology’ here refers to the range of methods and techniques deployed by the artist in order to bring to light what has lain hidden; it implies excavation and depth, an attentiveness to the sedimented layers and accretions of historical time, and approaches the city as a palimpsest of traces. One can also divine a vision of the artist’s vocation underwriting the method; it has a critical dimension that sees his work as a dissection, as an analysis of social structures that makes visible the conditions that necessitate them and that it hides. The archaeological metaphor that organizes and runs through his recent work is a logical extension of concerns that belong to its prehistory, which saw the artist involved in a cartography of social structurations (what he calls “social mapping”); – the newer work draws upon and retains in a transformed manner elements of his earlier engagements. The cartographic and the archaeological form the two axes of his current body of work, articulating the conceptual grid across which is distributed a series of relationships, – surface and depth, the new and the old, the spatial and the temporal, the historical and the political, and so on, – that are played off against each other in order to draw out a complex set of correspondences that delineate the histories of the present and its often fraught relationship with Modernity.”
You can find more about Gigi here:
- http://www.gigiscaria.inhttps://www.artsy.net/artist/gigi-scaria
- https://www.saffronart.com/artists/gigi-scaria
- https://www.anantart.com/Gigi-Scaria
- http://www.vadehraart.com/eccehomo/gigiscaria
“I was curious to know more about the vibrant forms of colours on display in and around my cultural landscape. The working class movement in Kerala, my home state, whose influence no artist could escape, also opened me to the changing notions of what constitute revolutionary politics and its links to ideas of labour. The degeneration of movement in recent times, exemplified by the use of violence to further sectarian interests.
This is in a way a continuation of my last exhibited work, Multitudes a meditation of chaos of our daily living. In Multitudes, a series of acrylic paintings on canvasses and charcoal on paper. I tried to make sense of time and space: to grasp the universal and how it is represented in the personal. The macrocosm and the microcosm to me are part of the same whole, the same dialectic. Each leaves its imprint on the other; the chaos is all encompassing. The witness and the victim are one and the same. As an artist, I look for places that could influence my strokes, my colors.”
“Predicaments of a city or the violence as pathology
My paintings broadly map out the radically changing spatial rhythms and the territorial disciplining of urban landscapes in the modern times. By appropriating the visually arresting images of the contemporary urban life, I, in the lights of my experiences of the city, try to explain the moments where the architecture becomes political. In doing so, I specifically try to address the questions such as the disciplinary powers and the regulatory mechanisms of the modern cities. This, in effect, explains; how do urban landscapes and its architectural
ordering express and practice moderns institute’s rationalities, how architecture determine the activities of people and how it influences and affects their behavior.
These paintings suggest, as Bourdieu has pointed out, that buildings not only serve a functional purpose, but they also express a set of symbolic opposition and hierarchies that order the societal divisions.
These propositions lead to other layers of my work. Violence is an overarching presence in my paintings. It, in many ways, explains how violence is structural to the very idea of our modern-secular life. Modernity and its various representative institutions have become new justificatory principles to defend violence. In its drive to “progress” violence has established a secure relationship with the philosophy and practice of development. For me, the cities dramatically demonstrate this phenomenon.
Cities always offer multiple possibilities within which a specialized otherness can flourish. In my works, superimposition of spaces and objects that can never being together is a technique to bring out the complexities involved in the process of othering. This otherness is the result of disciplinary power of the architectural space. Thus cities constitute one of the important moments of psychic collapse in ones life. The attempt of my paintings is to capture these moments of psychic collapses.
As symptomatic responses to the trauma of development, my work is an ethical inquiry and critique of the history of the contemporary and place modernity as an active engagement with violence. This, in effect, will enlighten us of the ways in which we perceive and resist the historical construction of violence and thereby will equip us to critically challenge the melancholy tenor of our contemporary crisis.
In the course of visualizing this phenomenon, I situate myself in a rapidly changing urban space like Hyderabad, India. My training as a draughtsman for the Indian Army and the brief employment in the construction industry have left their imprint on both the themes and the formal tendencies of my works. The dizzying prospects and panoramic views of rice fields around my hometown in South India, the huddle of tenements in neighboring Erode and Coimbatore, the architectural monstrosities that thrust upwards from the implacable flatness of the Deccan are the other memories, influence and structures that shape my visual strategies.”
“Anil Thambai’s endeavor is to initiate visual dialogues through an involvement of historical imageries in transcended time and space. References help to camouflage the cultural and social critique that he wants to forward through his works, the subtle references of images from global and local history helps these works to have an international appeal.”
Ratheesh T. (b.1980, Kerala)
Read about his work and discover more, here- RT
In large oils on canvas that are intensely moving and powerful, Ratheesh T. fiercely examines the self, life, death, family and nature. His paintings evoke a spreading range in space and time, blurring the distinction between the imagined and the real, between past and present. The artist can transform existing socio-cultural structures that stem from personal recall into environments that exhibit degrees of artifice yet occur again and again in reality. Revealed in his works, are the contemporary possibilities of the classic — the tangible qualities of form, light, color and texture and the intangible ones of high imagination, subtle evocation and an intrinsic acknowledgment of all that is unknowable.
Sajeev Visweswaran. (b.1980, Kerala)
Sajeev Visweswaran is a visual artist from Kerala, based in New Delhi and Ann Arbor.
“While he works in many media and styles, drawing always comes at the center of his work. He has maintained a focus on minimalist lines and measures etchings throughout his repertoire. Sajeev’s works draw on the tension between the mundane activities of every day life and his political sensibilities, between his young life in village India and the world of fine art. He is fascinated by the intersection of the personal and the political, presence and absence, the domestic and the public.”
Gipin Varghese. (b.1980, Kerala)
Gipin Varghese is an artist from Kerala whose work relates to the adversities of human condition. (Images courtesy Gipin V.). In his words :
“My works are drawings by led pencils, filled and washed with diluted colour layers.
They are narratives based on some news and incidents which affects me badly. They explores how human oppress fellow human and non-human beings to protect power, ownership and wealth.They moves around the subtle planes of hunting,violence,battle and invasions…
They are the memories of wounds.”
Siji Krishnan (b.1983, Kerala)
Siji works with watercolours on layers of rice paper on canvas. She depicts groups of people, families and scenes inspired by her Kerala (South India) countryside origins on these sometime large (3m) format artworks. Read her artist statement. (Image Source Siji Krishnan. © Siji Krishnan)
As a person who was born and brought up in the countryside in southern India, the vivid imagery of village life that is deeply embedded inside me, played an important role in the early years of my ar/s/c endeavour. As a child I was more aUached to my father than anyone else. Unfathomable paternal love and care nurtured the ar/st within me. His presence, as well as absence, has acted like a force and enabled me to shape my life as an ar/st. The images in early works sprang from the pool of my childhood memories, mostly related to my father. But I never wanted to s/ck to anything, new paths were revealed and transported me from a very personal world to a collec/ve world, as though a layer of memory was peeled off and a new one revealed. This /me my canvases became vaster and provided space for more inhabitants. Now I am realizing that it is essen/al to be exploring new territories, even physically to have new experiences, in order to take my journey further. Moving beyond the poli/cal and geographical boundaries will give a firsthand experience of other cultures. I strongly believe that it is only such mobility will set me free from cultural and gender confinements.
Siji Krishnan
Jalaja P.S. (b.1983, Kerala)
Jalaja PS is a Kochi (Kerala, India) based artist. Her main preoccupation is with human condition and she portraits single workers or very large groups of people in vivid colours, trying to catch their joys, sorrows and conflicts. In the panel we show, are two details from large watercolour on paper paintings of crowds (Unititled/police group, and Bitter Sweet History, click title for full image), the Tug of War (10mx1.5m painting from her Daily Violence series) and “street art” portraits of working class people (2017, acrylic on wall).
Read more about her vision and descriptions of these works. (Images courtesy of the artist, © Jalaja)
Through my work I try to trace the history of ‘man’ within the collective ‘human’ history. This history has much importance in my works. The news and images of today are stored in me as my own visual conclusions and structures and it get reflected in my works. The ‘man’, subject to contradictions, changes and experiments, sometimes the conqueror and ecstatic, and sometimes the vanquished and defeated. My works are positioned somewhere between these contradictions. It tries to tell their stories, their battles, their pleasures, their victories, their perils, their defeats. I draw man with a purpose and sometimes without one single aim. Through my works, I try to offer a counter vision of a wide laugh and a deep cry within the canvas of many histories of man.
Tug of War (The Daily Violence Series-I ). People in various countries, especially children are being affected by the violence of war. This is the underlying concern of my process. My feeling is that any war primarily victimizes children. War stems out of ignorance. Colonialism, imperialism and globalization are presenting their own challenges in front of us. I am puzzled by the warmongering of even the underdeveloped countries of the world. Children and women are still the victims of all these. Objectification of the downtrodden has been going on even now. I am trying to reflect in my art practice the possibility of a new vision of hope for a better tomorrow. Using the observation for paving these cornerstones is my primary process now. People’s concerns about daily life are universal in every country. But the difference of affecting them varies. Self-sabotaging of one’s own efforts is a mistake many people repeat because of ignorance. Sometimes survivors treat the submissive ones as their subordinates. By going through the process I believe that I too am a part of the ongoing cultural engineering of our times. Art also has a part to play in this transformation. There is a space for intervention using art in the present context. I am trying to find a substantive balance between historic facts and contemporary concerns.
Boat People. The series of works titles Boat People is the reflection on human displacement due to ethnic cleansing and border conflicts. New wars stem up everywhere as the whole world is being affected by them never before. An over-loaded boat filled with whatever belongings one could grab in the beginning of the exodus, has become the iconic symbol for the great human tragedy of our times. We called the Boat People during Vietnam war. The same struggle for survival of ordinary people from Syria and countries like Iraq are happening right now in front of our eyes. I am being affected by all these powerful images of human suffering. These works are the continuation of my last series which was also about the extreme pain and suffering humans go through, as they are pushed into the predicament of loneliness and helplessness.
Working Class Heroes. These are the site-specific portraits of labourers including men and women engaged in diverse work culture that has been unravelling through an interactive performance within distinct public spaces and localities thereby identifying and recognizing the portrayed individuals/ labourers by their acquaintances. In fact, they can even be acknowledged as wall paintings due to its noted endorsement on public walls of shops, institutions and streets of the cosmopolitan Kochi and Mattancherry suburbs. The portraits at the time stand as a tribute to the people of the historic Mattancherry, and as a mirror to the contemporary lives of the citizens. When thinking of the project in other various places, it opens up a new path to search and understand the stories of each person, family, community and society. This process of making portraits by interacting with the local community builds a narrative to the history forgotten and history in making. It is an ongoing project of documenting the history and culture of people. In brief this project of portraits on public walls is a way of recalling what was there, and a revelation of the now life of the people. I believe that the wall I choose to work itself will start to communicate.
