Sajeev Visweswaran’s drawings look like fine incisions made
on the surface of a paper; they resemble the precise etching lines made on a
zinc plate with an acute stylus. Though Sajeev was trained as a painter during
his graduate years, his calling was to become a graphic artist for with the
kind of dexterity in capturing images using lines, which defy all kinds of
volume possible through shading. Sajeev’s drawings are not lyrical and their
warm precision does not even resemble the studied clarity of the architectural
drawings. They, for me at least, look like flattened images, peeled off layer
after layer from his repository of memories. This must be one reason why
Sajeev, after his post graduation in graphic arts from the Fine Arts Faculty,
Baroda, spent a few years as a teacher the same department and became one of
the most sought after teachers by the young students. Deliberately reluctant in
using colours, Sajeev’s works look like minutely detailed paintings from where
colours and volume have staged a walk out, leaving the lines to stand naked,
stark and like razor’s edge.
When his solo display opens today at Bengaluru’s 1Shanti
Road, Sajeev must be anxious about the audience's response for the space is
already famous for experimental art including gallery based installations and
performance art. From the images I gather that the ambience as well as the
demand of the space have influenced Sajeev to do some kind of experiments with
his drawings, if not about colours and volume but about their sizes and
appearances. There are straight drawings in the hallmark style of Sajeev
Visweswaran but at the same time there are certain assemblages where his
miniature size drawings are kept in tiny containers that are generally used by
the watch repairers for keeping the micro machine parts of the wrist watches.
In today’s use and throw world, perhaps watch repairers are anachronisms like
tailors in city; they almost look like sailors in their crew uniforms stranded
in the middle of a desert. But when Sajeev brings those outdated vitrines to an
exhibition space, it cannot be for anything but to remind the viewer of those
good old days where people could see the finer details of things, when they
could stand and stare with absolute concentration, exactly the way a watch
repairer looks at micro world of machines through a magnifying glass.
Only up to that extent we could say that Sajeev’s works are
lyrical or poetic. But however precise he is in his drawings, and however he
eschews consciously the romanticism of colours, so long as he uses memories as
his raw materials, he cannot do away with lyricism completely. In a sense, for
Sajeev, these drawings come to life as a part of his self purgation or
catharsis. Strangely caught up in the web of love for his wrinkled grandmother,
the early drawings of Sajeev were a recurring tribute to the old age of that
grand old lady. Sajeev saw his creative world moving around an axis in the form
of his grandmother. He repeatedly drew the portrait of that lady, sitting,
sleeping, thinking, speaking, day dreaming, speaking to cats, dogs and birds,
and so on. This strange of obsession with an old woman, a grandchild’s
perennial need to be in the vicinity of a story telling grandmother, had set
the tone of his drawings, at times to the dismay of the viewer. What is there
so much to speak about an old lady, one would wonder. But for Sajeev, he saw
the world through her, the papaya tree seen in the courtyards, his parents in a
morning stroll in their backyard vegetable garden, the room interiors, the cats
that move around; they looked like registering moments for the artist to
cherish on later days. But then, why couldn’t he do the same with a camera.
Sajeev with his skill for creating line drawings feels it impossible
for him to see an image through a camera. Perhaps, he is a young artist who is
without a digital camera that could instantly convert an observed image into a
permanent moment, and proliferate if need be. But Sajeev, with his film camera
enjoys that anxiety about a captured moment which manifests only when it is
treated in a darkroom and he likes to see the surprises that it would reveal
there. He is a strange pilgrim in a popular site of pilgrimage. He is a
pedestrian in the street filled with digital vehicles; and he enjoys the walk
thoroughly. After his grandmother’s death, Sajeev seems to have come to his own
devices of negotiating the world. What he has been taking in from around his
surroundings subconsciously seems to come back actively to goad him to see the
truth of his life without the context of familial love and gratitude. In the
new body of works, Sajeev uses memory as a spring board and take a plunge into
the political memory of the country.
However, I do not say that his drawings are overtly
political. They suggest politics only when we know for sure that he has been
living in Baroda for almost a decade now and has seen the after effects of
communal violence and designer pogroms. He never has been a direct victim of
all these social atrocities. But once he has overcome the grip of the memories
about his grandmother, there seems to have happened a transportation of his own
artistic self to the living moments of larger reality. The internalized
violence of a society comes to take unprecedentedly strange forms in Sajeev’s
drawings. Hence, here you see a lotus pond in fire or a lotus pond with fire
emitting from at least some of the lotus flowers. Does the artist obliquely
suggest a political party that has lotus as a political symbol and has all the tendencies
to instigate communal divisions and hatred? Is burning lotus a symbol that
surreptitiously comments upon the political changes in the country? Or is it a
radical shift from the painterly traditions created by senior artists like
A.Ramachandran, who has been drawing and painting lotus ponds relentlessly for
some many years?
In one of the works, Sajeev uses an old wooden box with a
sliding lid that moves along a pair of horizontal grooves. This box, seen from
the memories of a rural past, was used for keeping spices in the kitchen.
Sometimes these boxes were used as containers for keeping anything that would
have a future use; it could be a shell, a few pebbles, buttons, needle and
threads, old coins, broken toys and so on. Interestingly, these boxes were the favourite
items/possessions of the grandmothers. From these magical boxes they used to
conjure up divine objects for their grandchildren to play with. This particular
treasure trove today is a useless object devoid of even aesthetic value as they
are not ornamented or intricately carved with an inlay of mother pearls or
ivory. This simple box, with a lid half slid opened, has a little drawing in
it; a drawing of a burning wagon. I say Godhra but the artist says Auschwitz. I
say 1921 mutiny and the artist says one is free to find associations. Effective
in its simple visual presence, this particular work, however is not exceptional
as a few artists have attempted this several years before.
Sajeev titles his works as ‘Forgotten Memories’. If they are
forgotten memories, then definitely these works are the reclamation of the
same. Memories are a war against oblivion. So if someone asks, the way someone
had asked Picasso, what is happening in your lines, then Sajeev could obviously
say that a war is on in his lines because these line drawings are his attempts
in retrieving the memories from a permanent loss or from them getting submerged
into the glitter and glamour/clamour of the present day world. Seen from a
different perspective, Sajeev works could be seen as fading lines. They are
almost invisible on the surface and this near invisibility could be a ploy used
by the artist to make his viewers to remember hard. For the familiar ones,
there would be sense of elation in finding similarities, and for the new
comers, Sajeev’s works would function as a key to open their own memories. Have
they got such fading memories? Are the still in a war with oblivion? These
works, for me, are Sajeev’s attempt to memorialize moments than memorise them.
Sajeev’s drawings are sepulchres created out of icicles. Will they withstand
the heat of time? Let time tell the answer.
(pics by Cops Shiva)
(pics by Cops Shiva)
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