CHENNAI: Art is a fusion of fact and fantasy, a deft fusing of social and emotional substance, and an exploration of cross-cultural relationships. Madras Muse, the art exhibition at InKo centre featuring four artists residing in the city, is an expression of the subtleties of life when viewed from a distance. Zooming into the creations, we find the common thread which connects all the artists’ works — the ever-changing nature of the human condition and the analysis of how societal institutions and constructions affect people’s psyches and ways of being.
Introducing the artists and their works, Rathi Jafer, director, InKo Centre, Chennai shares, “The artists were united by the way they experimented and reacted to social issues. Geetika Juyal Chatterjee combines art, science, and spiritual insights. Samuel Jayachandran uses pop art in seemingly mundane things. Vijayaraghavan is a multi-disciplinary artist who works with both video and multimedia. His works are more about the binaries, exploring from the good and the bad to the more complex details. Michael Irudayaraj has a layering technique where memory, identity, and history are coming together. All of them experiment with different techniques and mediums,” adding that through this exhibition the institution wants to promote local artists.
Understanding the muse
Madras Muse welcomes us to Geethika’s paintings that revel in pastel shades. The artist uses a geometric, minimally abstracted visual language with a strong spiritual undertone. She aims to convey the idea of love via her work. Speaking about the acrylic painting “Love formed me like itself,” she shares, adding, “Even if you have everything in the world, without love, you feel as though you have nothing in life. Every time I have encountered unconditional love, I strive to capture it on canvas in an effort to convey my ongoing desire for love. Through this abstract artwork, I have tried to capture the visual impressions I have of what it could be like to embody the quality of love that is unfailing.”
Amid the colourful paintings lie a wooden installation titled ‘Imbalance’ that combines 20 wooden rods aligned at different heights. Samuel, the creator explains, “I have been living in India for almost seven years now and I have seen the imbalance between the people in terms of culture, religion, caste, politics, and many other factors. As an artist, I wanted to bring all those issues that separate us to the limelight, with my art. Each of the twenty rods represents a different issue and their placement reflects the imbalance.”
The artist has experimented with different materials like banana fibres to show his inclination towards discarded materials. His photographs displayed were also abstract and portrayed bright colours. He says, “The photographs were taken in Kanchipuram. I wanted to show them in bright colours as the story behind the pictures, those of the weavers were dark. They were not properly benefiting from the work they did.”
When the other artists focus on societal issues, Michael’s works look into the unconscious manifestations of the mind. The layering technique he uses lends his compositions a meta-narrative element. His artistic output, Chronicle Land, exposes a rich visual dialogue that links human nature, the body-mind, pain and pleasure, the past and present, and his idea of Tamil culture. He emphasises on recalling prior experiences when the villages were pollution-free and humans and animals survived together happily.
“The pictures I have seen in my childhood and the land which is divided is being reflected in my work. I used watercolour, wax, smoke, and pencil,” he says.
Vijayaraghavan tries to blend in both society and the individual. His creations reflect the quest that drives human existence and life. His animated single-channel video projections titled Techno Avatar-1 and Wake Me Up, which were made in Berlin and Portugal respectively, are displayed for the first time in Chennai. The artist delves into the opposing forces or binaries at work in daily life, including truth and falsehood, good and bad, attraction and repulsion, and conceptual notions of reciprocal visual dialogues that dehumanise in metropolitan settings.
Explaining his painting, Nostalgia, he says, “I lived in Singapore for a few years. When you are going outside India you are in the diaspora engaging with memories and the past. I have represented the cityscape in the background and the memories in the foreground. I have also used cultural connections showing fish, Vishnu’s avatar, and Noah’s ark, intending the fusion of the East and West.” The simultaneous meetings between the conventional and the unorthodox in his work, as well as his expansion into the world of new media technologies and the dimensions of estrangements of the visual surface into detectable pictures, define the artist’s style.
Collaboration of the like-minded
The exhibition is the collaboration of four people who met at the right time and right place, comments Geetika. Vijayaraghavan, the curator of the event details, “We had the idea of exhibiting our works during the pandemic. The focus was on the artists living in Chennai who were continuously working with material exploration in a post-modernism context. All three artists except Geetika are from Chennai, but Geetika had been residing here for the past few years. InKo has given us a great opportunity when most of the private galleries do not promote experimental work.”
For details, visit: www.inkocentre.org