(KT Mathai with Climacterics. 2008 pic courtesy The Hindu)
Do you remember an exhibition titled ‘Fairy Tales from a
Lost Land’ by artist KT Mathai? This exhibition was held exactly ten years back
at a private gallery in Kochi. During the last ten years Mathai’s style has
changed but his concerns remain the same; his perennial love and reverence for
the mother earth. The people and locale that come in his paintings repetitively
have transformed to take some ethereal and beyond the real forms; but they all
hover around, play, worship, dance, whirl and mourn in and over the same land;
his land, his village, the village that he loves, the village that he refuses
to move away, the village where he was born, brought and has now set up his
life. He has been the chronicler of the village Arakkunnam, near Eranakulam
which has taken the shape of another Macondo in his visual narratives.
I pick out Mathai out of the whole lot of artists in Kerala
today not because others are irrelevant but Mathai is more relevant than
anybody that I could think of. When none was listening he was sending his silent yet
loud visual warnings to his state; his works captured the scars created by the
earth movers, JCBs as they are fondly called, all over the places. His works
apparently looked so appealing in their reds, greens and blues. While the green
stood for the overpowering but slowly diminishing green cover of the state the
blues represented the fluid nature; the rivers. What made the paintings move
beyond the romantic renderings of a recluse artist and made them starkly
political (a word which was not in vogue perhaps a decade back) were the red
patches that added visual rhythm to the paintings. They were in fact the gnawed
portion of rich earth by the avarice of the human kind; the land mafia
protected by local lords and political overlords.
(Another Climacterics by KT Mathai)
Mathai did not say that a landslide was in the offing. Nor
did he predict any flood and deluge. But what he did in his paintings was the
depiction of the damage that the human beings were inflicting upon the very
earth which in fact providing home even to her tormentors. Mathai’s was not an
aggressive artistic stance. He knew that he could not fight the land mafia. But
he kept his guard as high as possible and upped his antennas always. Like a
concerned citizen, whenever he got an opportunity he exhibited the works that
framed the scars of earth. They were overtly beautiful so that even the blood
of the earth looked like piece of visual treat. His work ‘Climacterics’ says it
all. One of his works had an image of his young son playing with a JCB Plastic
Toy while at a distance the real JCBs were performing their vandalism.
Ten years down the line, we see the landslides, exactly at
the places where Mathai would have painted. But we know that none heeds the
warning signals sent by an artist in his works. They may buy it and finish its
critical journey and confine it into some drawing rooms. Journalists may breast
beat in their reports covering the exhibitions. Eventually nothing happens. But
Mathai has been relentless. In 2012 April he did a performance titled ‘Transparent
Pact’ in collaboration with his village Arakkunnam and the parish there. He
brought a blessed sapling from the church and took it out in a village
procession as it were the crucifix icon and planted at a clearing opened up by
the JCBs over a period of land mining. I had given a cover story to Mathai in
the Art and Deal magazine which I was editing then. And I attach my blog link
on the same performance and my views on it (http://johnyml.blogspot.com/2012/04/transparent-pact-performance-for-our.html).
At times people should heed to what artists are trying to say. They need not be
overtly political or social activists-kind of artists. They could be as simple
as an artist like Mathai. Often prophets look very ordinary.
(works by Rajan Krishnan)
When I write about KT Mathai’s works, I have to mention the
works of Rajan Krishnan, who while living, tirelessly depicted the receding
line of Kandal forests, which were the repositories of rain water and rare
fauna. Kandal forests were taken over by high rises and bungalows. And today
you see rich and the powerful, just like the ordinary mortals, standing on the
second floor terraces and balconies folding hands and pleading to be evacuated
from their waterlogged homes. Rajan painted the scenes after the apocalypse has
already happened. He had envisioned such a scenario, while Mathai knew the
silence before the storm.
(Kara by Sukesan Kanka)
We have another mad prophet among us in the guise of
Sukesan Kanka who has recently painted a work titled ‘Kara’(Shore) and has been
fighting a local fight back in Thrissur to save environment. The fight might
have looked like a tussle between egoistic neighbors. But Sukesan has a point
to say. If you make boundary walls everywhere what you make are future floods.
He said it in early this year when he presented the work ‘Kara’ in a solo
exhibition titled ‘Min(d)rive’ in February 2018. In Kara you see a sort of breaking
away of land masses and in each piece you see a human/saintly being
gesticulating each other, perhaps underlining the absurdity of the human acts
that create ruptures all over. On the right side of the painting one could see
a visionary pointing out to the horizon as if to show the impending doom. But
we need a deluge to realize that the earth under our feet is being washed away.
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