DR. ASHRAFI S. BHAGAT
A charity show titled art aids… in collaboration with Apparao Galleries Chennai, INBOX 1305, alaihal MEDIA puts together works of ten nationally acclaimed artists. The intention is to raise funds through this initiative to dominantly draw attention to the AIDS pandemic, to facilitate awareness in the spread of this disease, supporting methods in which assistance is offered to the children living with HIV/AIDS, and helping to inculcate consciousness in future prevention.
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| First Anniversary Initiative from PAI TRUST |
The ten artists who have generously donated their works are Farhan Mujib, P.G. Dinesh, N. Ramachandran, Niloufer Seth Siddharth, P. Suresh Kumar, George K., Bhavna Sonawane, Trotsky Marudu, Mark Rathinaraj and K.R. Santhana Krishnan. Except for Farhan, Dinesh and Bhavna who are based in Delhi, Cochin and Mumbai respectively, the rest belong to the city of Chennai. The works of these artists is marked by a diversity of visual language which makes it visually exciting and offers textural interest. Post Madras Art Movement, artists in Chennai have forged ahead with different medium, materials, techniques, and concepts that has changed the texture of art making in this metro. Within this context of essential changes, the perceptions of the artists have equally come to bear upon their lived realities producing art expressions that can be read as a case of significant conceptualization.
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| 'Line on Grey' series 5 |
Trotsky Marudu in addition to making line his main protagonist to communicate his concepts and emotions he also engages with colours employing strokes in dynamic gestural rhythms and movement in creating his abstracts that are invested with energy. Trotsky wears many hats and his artistic expression is not confined to one medium of either painting or drawing. His field includes graphic design, book illustrations, art direction for popular cinema, textile design, animation, and social activism. With experience and expertise in diverse fields it comes as no surprise that the artist directs his lines and colours with absolute command and confidence. What needs to be appreciated about his engagement with these two elements is that he not only exhibits fluid facility but it is the quality of line either independently or drawn through colours that can be read as emotional, sentimental, sensitive, aggressive, poetic, subliminal, descriptive and narrative.
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| Neighbourhood series 16 |
Mark Rathinaraj’s interpolation through lines enables him to render figurative imagery with easy facility. His paintings and sketches do emphasize the ethnicity with colour and facial contours. In absolute control of his medium, Mark has mediated through this versatile element to recreate generic portraits of people with different professions and occupation. The stunning simplicity of his visual approach invests it power. What distinguishes his works is his thick, confident meandering, and lines rendered with absolute assurance. Moving beyond he now concentrates exclusively on faces creating interesting caricatures of ethnic types.
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| Untitled |
K. R. Santhana Krishnan engages with the liminal concept interfacing with doors to explicate his ideas of the past and the future. Interfacing with the metaphor of the threshold, the artist articulates his expressions through the motif of the doors and the reality that lie beyond it. His visual language is premised on realism which enhances his conceptual approach. The colours are equally vibrant as observed in the street culture of smaller towns.
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| Melancholy |
George K’s versatility emerges from his conceptual approach and makes an impact through his hyper realism. In an encounter with his works one perceives the style, which underpins realism, pop culture and the graffiti scribbled across the painting. The execution of paintings is carried out from photographs shot by George; by hoarding artists, typified by their broad brush strokes, expansive tonalities, shades and colours. The works are further extended by George who scribbles his poetry across or make similar marks that bear the trace of his personality.
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| Degree of Certainty |
N. Ramachandran’s works are process oriented and he conceptualizes upon the elusive and engages with various mediums as photography, the kitsch elements, newspaper, drawings and found objects, shaping his concepts through it. His extensive use of the body in fragments may appear traditional, but are assemblages dividing it to interface his experiences. These reflections in his art works are made to appear as traditional paintings but are not; rather are made as assemblages divided into mathematically precise squares, with each containing an object. In his latest series, he has moved on to interrogate photographic images playing upon the binaries of self and shadow.
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| Still life with three vases |
Farhan Mujib is a papier colle artist creating collages which thematically reflects his visual culture rendered through delicate forms and shapes. The reality of the artist’s exploration is the visual culture namely the grocery store, a paan shop, a roadside dhaba, a market which offer a harsh, dynamic yet a vibrant collage of cultures, times and materials or the literature in terms of prose and poetry offering him a verbal reality which he transforms imaginatively– all of which defines a new aesthetic.
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| Untitled |
P. G. Dinesh has a satirical approach with his iconography which is diabolical and has the capacity to shock, interfacing with hybrid imagery to offer wit and humour. His style is dramatically simple and unabashed, his imagery tantalizing, seductive, engaging, powerful, provocative and shocking. His subject is his invented individualized history and myths excavated from the popular visual culture of his milieu, creating a narrative of the contemporary.
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| Untitled |
Niloufer Seth Siddharth who is an artist trained in painting and visual communication, interfaces with generic female faces, juxtaposing it with a flower, to convey fragility, innocence and covert eroticism. With her feminine approach she creates prettified faces and sensuous elegant female forms indirectly making a narrative of the consumer culture of fashion. The flowers enable her to emote as she has engaged with different decorative varieties, reflecting her feminine world, which is one of beauty, emotions, feelings, wish fulfillment as well as her gentle persona and quite demeanor.
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| Bloom |
Bhavna Sonawane interfaces with her city to create evocative architectural topographies that transmutes to a fairy land with subtle colours and shades. Despite the fact that it a bustling overcrowded metro she engages with its architecture and varied sights and sounds to evoke a serene world lending to it a lyrical charm. She allows a materialization of this world through her lines and an evocative poetic colour which is manipulated with fluid grace obtaining results that impart an appearance of transparency and opaqueness at the same time. This perhaps is her strength which along with her mellifluous line marks it as her signature style.
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| Orange AB |
P. Suresh Kumar’s abstraction with colour fields gestalts to varied images animate or inanimate. The vibrancy of colours and the rich resonance of its chroma make a dynamic impact on the viewer’s sensibility. The gestural rhythm implicit in his brush strokes and colour juxtaposition implicates a mastery over these elements. His manipulation of colours with what appears as random brush or palette knife strokes invests it emotional qualities. His abstracts radiate with concealed light, which enhances the significance of his abstracts.
Dr. Ashrafi S. Bhagat M.A., M.Phil, Ph. D. is an Art Historian, Art Critic and an Author. She is Associate Professor and Former Head teaching at the Department of Fine Art, Stella Maris College, [Autonomous] Chennai. She writes exhibition catalogues for artists and on modern and contemporary art in newspapers, magazines and journals.
