NEW DELHI: Fragments in themselves don’t say much. But within each of these fragments, lies wholeness. As life goes on, each little piece stores in its nucleus, a world of experiences that, when pieced together, reveal a universe of allegories. This becomes clear as we stand infront of artist C. Douglas’ paintings. The intensity palpable. The show is called In Search of Fragments and is being presented by Akar Prakar.
From 1990s to a few years back, his work journeys through the time when he began developing his signature grey works influenced by German Expressionists, a movement that went beyond literal representations. Greys began to be frequently used by Douglas because they stood for a transitional state that, in his own words, the colour embraced vulnerability over heroism and uncertainty over finality. “There is a slowness about the illustrations in grey,” he says.
His work mirrors his life and his life echoes his work, and this inseparability comes from the closeness between them. Everything he knows and does as a result of it, is a comment on what he has grown to believe as purposeful. “My work and my life cannot be separated as it is a constant process of negotiation. I have been negotiating various identities—as an artist from another state living in Chennai; as an artist from within Chennai who lives in the Cholamandal Artists’ Village, and as an artist who is an integral part of the Madras Art Movement but creates works that cannot be easily fitted within the nativist ideology of the movement,” he points out.
There always remains ambiguity over his belongingness. It is exactly these fragments of uncertainty, emptiness, contemplativeness, that are represented through the mixed media works in In Search of Fragments. The disjointedness of objects such as mannequins, broken ladders and phones with receivers off the hook, plastic flowers, toy birds, all point to a certain incoherency.
Douglas has found commonality of thought in Modernist authors such as TS Eliot, Rilke, Rimbaud and Camus as well as theorists such as Derrida and Foucault. “So while theory informs my work, the body which I see is instinctive, as against the deliberative. There is so much of stress on the body in the South. Take for instance artist A P Santhanaraj, whose work had bloody bleeding lines.
They are expressive. Similarly Joseph James talks about Paniker’s ‘nervous lines’. They are like body or palm prints. In my works of the 1990’s, I bring the body into my work through material,” says Douglas, who learnt his draughtsmanship under artist K.Ramanujam’s tutelage at the college in Madras.
But since the last 10 years, his inclination has shifted to figures. In this respect, the Madras Art Movement where one’s identity is inter-twined with the surrounding cultural milieu, the artist found himself expressing through the human form increasingly.
Through it all, Douglas has great regard for Ramanujam who lived a life of social exile. He found himself drawn to Ramanujam’s persona and his ink drawings inspired by film, fantasy and architecture. He then moved to the Cholamandalam Artists’ Village and then to Germany. “My subsequent return to the village, shattered the world I had inhabited. Like Ramanujam depicted himself travelling but never arriving, my works began to express the desire ‘to leave but never to reach’,” he says.
At the end of our conversation, Douglas quotes his favourite verse from the Upanishad. “That is complete, this is complete, from the completeness comes the completeness, if completeness is taken away from completeness, only completeness remains”. Good to know: Till July 28, from 11 am to 7 pm, at Akar Prakar, D-43, First Floor, Defence Colony.