The Artist/s who Predicted the Kerala Deluge: KT Mathai, Rajan Krishnan and Sukesan Kanka

(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.