(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.
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.
‘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.
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.”
No comments:
Post a Comment