Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Conversations Abundant and Abandoned: Art of Vishnu Priyan



(artist Vishnu Priyan)


Some of his works exude the feel of the widely known Mexican Murals. But a closer look reveals that these works do not have anything to do with those murals. Ask the artist, Vishnu Priyan, he would tell you that all his works are about conversations; an image conversing with the other image or images. They are also conversations without any particular reason. What Vishnu Priyan loves to do is to allow his stream of consciousness flow freely on to his canvases. A post graduate in painting from Kerala’s Sree Sankara University, Kalady, Vishnu Priyan also had won a first rank in graduation in the same discipline. He stands at the crossroads of life, waiting for a major decision to happen and the precariousness that he feels at this juncture is perhaps palpable in his recent paintings. Emotions, aspirations, desires and dreams overpower him while he stands firmly rooted in the materialistic reality around him, confronting people, witnessing events, participating in conversations and eavesdropping in village grapevine. They all together forms a stream that spreads like a thick liquid resembling blood and there each organic part of human or animal body gains autonomy and speaks as well as acts for itself while the inorganic objects cling together each other to form metastasising structures enveloping the organs that have just gained autonomy.

(work by Vishnu Priyan)


In the Mexican Murals there is always a movement; a movement to the right or to the left or bursting out from the centre and going towards all the four sides. There are no disparate movements so that the whole picture looks shaky and flimsy. The Mexican murals have structural cohesiveness like the march past of a trained army. It may be army or the ordinary people but as they are anticipating progress and forward movement, their movements are rhythmic and coherent. There is heroism in each face and magnanimity in each act. Even the humblest of farmers look Grecian heroes even in their ordinariness. Make a contrast of these qualities with the paintings of Vishnu Priyan, we would come to see his works stand for all what is not said about the Mexican murals. What I want to say is that his works should not be seen as a takeoff from the mural tradition of the west. Rather, they are more like dream like expressions, merging socialist realism with surrealism, and Expressionism with the refined cubism of Fernand Leger. We could also see some works taking inspiration from the works of the great Travancore mythologist, Gopikrishna and some works travelling back in centuries and landing up in the Mughal courts where miniature karkhanas were established. Vishnu Priyan also likes to take a detour all over the contemporary art scene and find quirky examples to embellish his works.

(work by Vishnu Priyan)


‘Here is a Bus Waiting for You’ is a large watercolour work done by Vishnu Priyan in 2017. This work has the quintessential features of his thinking and handling of the images. The artist simulates the form of the popular red and yellow fast passenger bus run by the state transport corporation in Kerala. The bus is just a shell. It has no seats, platform, engine or tyres. But the bus is seen filled with people. Even on the top of the bus one could see a couple of passengers; a bull and a monkey. The crowded bus has a large variety of people; both male and female. Their dresses show that they are from different religions. Their feet are on the ground, which doubles up as a road but is strewn with colourful weapon like forms. Those forms could be some kind of network leading information to some other place. At the same time, as in a cross section of ground, we could see the underneath side of the road, which leads us to some sort of a nether world which is filled with strange plumbing networks. What does it all mean? Does it come as a critique on the current political scenario in which the artist is meant to live with all satisfaction? From his facebook profile I understand that the artist is a supporter of the left front in Kerala and believes in the future offered by the dominant party, the CPM. However, this belief seems to be thwarted at times and the artist seems dissatisfied with the kind of ‘progress’ that the party is making today. That may be the reason why the bus doesn’t have any tyres and people have to push themselves to the places where they want to reach.

(work by Vishnu Priyan)


That means, Vishnu Priyan believes in the human aspirations and desires, and also in the collective will to move forward despite their religious and racial differences. It is one way of presenting the progress that could be achieved even within chaos and the chaos that an ordered society often carries it in its brain and belly. What makes me think about the works of Vishnu Priyan fondly is the way the images and their handling form a language pattern that is often followed by the free and regular societies. Any linguistic usage/conversation in a ordinary life situation starts with a particular purpose and after fulfilling that it veers into the areas that it was not intending to enter. That means human conversations in a daily situation are not ‘ordered’ the way language is ordered in specific situations like operation theatres, political summits, science conferences and academic classrooms. In non-specific situations language breaks loose of itself and goes into the directions, creating a series of webs and interestingly each web creating its own sense and remaining there unaffected while another web creates another meaning. That means in our life, we live in such webs of language/s that move between purposeful conversations and idle talk. Vishnu Priyan seems to take each of the images in his paintings as a piece of conversation and let it develop on its own and leaves it there once its aim is achieved and engages with another stream of images.

(work by Vishnu Priyan)


The autonomy of the organic body parts emblematised in the images like a tongue or a piece of intestine climbing a stair or coming down by it in Vishnu Priyan’s works also exemplifies the autonomy of a conversation. That means, each layer of conversation (here in Vishnu Priyan’s works they are the layers of images) could be peeled off to see the underlying layer. However, as the artist makes each layer transparent it becomes easier for the viewer to follow another layer without really peeling off the first one. It is interesting to see that the artist paints a train entering into the platform in a very realistic style and suddenly he leaves it there and starts another layer of images just beneath it as if those human images were run over by the train, which in fact is not the case. We see some human images resembling the red volunteers of the CPM party turning themselves into animal incarnations. They must be the visions of the artist and without connecting them logically with another image ensemble for deliberate meaning creating, he leaves them off. So we have a series of images in Vishnu Priyan’s works that are owned up by the artists and at the same time by abandoned by him. It is same with the conversations that we do in our day to day lives. We do not own up all the words that we utter even if the ownership remains with us. But we ruthlessly abandon some words and sentences and even ideas as if they were not ours. That means our linguistic sphere is filled with utterances disowned by the speakers. Vishnu Priyan just makes a visual statement of the same. And with shock we come to know what are the images that we dream up and abandon half way exactly.


(work by Vishnu Priyan)


Vishnu Priyan uses stock images in his works in order to emphasis the fact that human beings think of the same thing repeatedly without any reason but leave them halfway. Also such topics come into our conversation just for the sake of talking about it like some meaningless words or expressions. The artist has stocked up such images in his repertoire and one of them is a woman in purdah eating bananas. Also there are many people seen eating bananas. Another stock character is a man-camel figure running towards some place. The image of banana bunches and the act of people eating bananas is interesting because it at once shows a banal act and a very erotically suggestive gesture. The presence of banana has multiple connotations; it shows eroticism for sure but at the same time it tells us that the act of eating banana is a banal act because it does not make on doing something very heroic. At the same time one tends to feel that we are living in a banana republic where the rules are created and twisted as per the need of the dictators. The people look absolutely foolish in such banana republics. Vishnu Priyan does not say that he lives in one or all of us are living in one. But he always shows the possibility of all of us falling into one. Besides, what I see is the proliferation of male values and patriarchal arrogance that most of us carry around in the society. The bananas look good but they are the gestures of blind arrogance also.

(work by Vishnu Priyan)


If we consider the canvases of Vishnu Priyan as a land, then we could definitely say that it is filled with the words and symbols of the people who live there. They are not only the words and symbols that manifest in reality but also take shape in imagination, thinking and dreams but not yet manifested in physical forms. So there is an etherized state of existence in these works. The dominant Hindu philosophy says that one should stop the act of thinking in order to achieve peace of mind and find salvation. Buddhism says that we just need to watch the thoughts that come and go often. They are not connected at all and the moment we look at the thoughts and their disconnectedness we understand the absurdity of it and as time passes the thoughts too will vanish and we achieve a sort of tranquillity. What Vishnu Priyan does in his paintings is simply watching the thoughts and recording them in his canvas in order to present the absurd drama of life and the life that blooms in the thought process. By doing this the artist must be getting some sort of tranquillity and happiness. In one of his latest works we see the image of Sankaracharya in his iconic posture and eating bananas. Vishnu Priyan studied in the Sankaracharya University and the presence of the iconic figure in the campus must have made him to come up with this image. The serene and meditative image of Sankaracharya becomes a bit banal and comic when he is seen eating a banana. That means, taking anything out of context or adding anything in a specific context would change the meaning of a thing completely and also would collapse the whole ideology behind it. It is like adding a moustache to Monalisa. Vishnu Priyan somehow subverts the dominant Sankaracharya ideology that had once thwarted the Buddhist philosophy which was more accommodative and had asked people to just look at their thoughts.

(work by Vishnu Priyan)


Of late Vishnu Priyan has been working in large canvases. He says that he takes around seven to eight months to complete a canvas. And he explains why his canvases are now becoming more crowded now. According to him, as he keeps sitting with the canvas for many months, he develops a sort of intimacy and the canvases assume certain ‘life’ in itself. Vishnu Priyan have long conversations with the canvas. He fights with it, abandons it and comes back and patches up with it. In the meanwhile the images that he takes away and brings back keep changing. “There is only a nascent idea when I start a work. But as this conversation starts with the canvas the whole thing changes. Working a painting means developing a love-hate relationship with the canvas and I do not know what could be the outcome of it. Sometimes, the works surprises me. Perhaps, life is also like that. We start somewhere and however we try, we reach somewhere else. I am not talking about destiny; but I am talking about the encounters that we have at every juncture in our lives. My canvases are full of such encounters. I enjoy these encounters now,” says Vishnu Priyan. In one of his works we see a purdah clad woman stitching a dress resembling a human body. And I reminded of the description of the terrible beauty of a young boy by the French poet, Lautreamont, “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

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