HYDERABAD: The heart of the sun, warmth of Asia, a paradox that completes and negates chilled ice: fire. It glows much brighter when picked up gently with brush strokes and put on a palette. It’s not just brightness that it lends to the canvas, it brings forth an artist’s vision, laying bare his though process. It becomes torchlight whose flame falls directly in the deepest recesses of his mind. And when he plucks it from his heart, he lights up his oeuvres which demand deep observation.
Kiran Varikilla does the same, for him the flame burning in the corner of his paintings is pure awakening of the self, a trail that leads to the opening of thoughts the way petals of a lotus open. In his solo exhibition ‘Form and Content’ ongoing at Gallery Space the shades of topaz, taupe, ochre, rule the palette rendering a scaffolding to the lines and dots that take shape in the frame.
At a glance the artworks done in acrylic appear to be abstracts: completely shapeless, oozing from a paint-drop taking forms of its own. But a closer look opens up the shapes hidden in the strokes. The artist has married abstract and figurative genre so beautifully that the opus as a whole appears to be taking a form of its own. At the same time, the artworks speak to the beholder telling tales of what the artist was going through. It is not just the sense of aesthetics that is established, the brush-strokes become raconteurs of the society, its sharp divisions of race, class and sex.
The artist takes the role of a feminist in one of his large paintings. A self-image of his appears to be hallucinating drawn with double lines. His grim face is almost pleading to someone oblivious to the resonance of his words. The artwork has shades of rose-quartz that seems to be bursting with pressure from an unknown source. The area around that image is kept shell-pink and at the feet of the artwork is a mishmash in shades of marsala.
Looking up at the canvas, one can’t help but notice a small archangel standing in shadow. Kiran shares, “When my second daughter was born, and people in the society were not kind. Earlier, they had also hinted about the burden of a girl-child stressing on female foeticide. I as a parent was disturbed.” That’s how he poured his deep anguish in shades of scarlet that summarises the onset of birth, the beginning, and sometimes, sadly, the colour of blood – the gory end.
His other works have shades of earth: russet, wood brown, mellow yellow and mud-green. His artistic sense is seasoned as he chooses animals and birds that take forms from the spillage of colours. In one of his paintings a beautiful blue peacock seems to be fading within the canvas while a nameless shape in dull olive oozes from the borders of the frame.
The juxtaposition of beauty and general inability to decipher the same in shapelessness is interesting. The artist has succeeded in delivering his message.
The exhibition at the gallery is on till July 31 and will travel to Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai where the solo show will be on from August 8 till 14