The title of the current exhibition at Time & Space - "Vignettes. Passages. Parables The Madras Movement" - (February 3 to 17) allows one to expect a presentation around what is now a classic chapter in Tamil Nadu art history associated since the 1950s with Cholamandal and the idea of the modernist indigenous.
The painters and sculptors, like K C S Paniker, Salim Ali and M Redappa Naidu, S Dhanapal and P V Janakiram, come to the mind along with their still presently successors from S G Vasudev to Dakshinamoorthy.
The actual display appears to be trying to bridge the impact of the old school and the new times without, however, including clearly contemporary choices, two of its participants directly drawing on that lineage and the other two non-obviously and individualistically reconciling it with more recent methods and aesthetic vocabularies.
The sculptures of S Nandagopal have all the ingredients of the Indology-based take on Hindu myths and icons, carrying echoes of traditional or folkloristic frontal views and line-encased but ornate volumes in a vivaciously playful and dynamic coexistence with High Modern, opened up plasticity and balanced asymmetry.
Oscillating between a pleasant, smooth stylisation and its light roughing, the artist brings the hieratic statuary to the level of warm domesticity, blending the behaviour of idols and mortals or nature's creatures, mixing temple attributes and kitchen utensils, figures, motifs and a sense of landscape.
The large paintings of K Muralidharan come from a similar background and wish to likewise reunite the poetic charm and fantasy of the ancient lore with the spirit of today.
Although the painter speaks about a surreal layer here, what reaches the eye is a jolly, slightly mischievous celebration of childhood stories that animate the whole world and are retained with innocence in adult life, while young women still have the capacity to metamorphose into divinities.
However much one may appreciate the cultured hold on and the free handing of the techniques in both cases, it would be difficult to miss the fairly formulaic approach and its decorative character.
In theory, the spectator might try to connect Rm. Palaniappan's work to his predecessors through his abstract images that almost like symbolic designs strive to imbue our measuring precision on the immediate plane with an intuition of cosmic spaces and motions over limitless time.
This, nonetheless, is done by him in a not obvious and not cluttered manner, the purely geometric forms and lucid lines suggesting simultaneously the coolness of scientific implements and universal trajectories that become, yet, reflected to a degree in the coarser, rugged markings of human hands, nerves and feelings further enhanced by the presence of philosophical jottings.
If his inspirations have a few decades behind them, the unspecific contemporariness of C. Douglas is as understated as it is his own. His vast paintings always verge on drawing, whilst the stained and crumpled, as though vulnerable and still resistant paper spreads and absorbs a kind of twilight darkness whose hopeless gloom somehow turns effulgent.
There prevails images of irrepressible sadness that indicates immersion in death but not without letting in the memory of a child's fascination preserved by the poet. This may be the most interesting part of the show, only the few of Douglas's relatively colourful and pattern-based composition disappointing despite their apparent allusiveness to the formal ways of Cholamandal.
Playing with water
The events at Jaaga on the 2nd and 3rd of this month saw quite absorbing experiments around the idea of water, its scarcity as well as its rooting on ancient traditions, to be experienced along the current sensitivities of urban youth accustomed to digital technology along with the fun and gaming it enables.
It seems that the involvement of the artists with the enchanting but nowadays problematic element intuitively necessitated the need to attract the viewers into interaction.
Even though some technical aspects of the pieces did not always work perfectly, one did appreciate the concepts having been mounted in real life experiences of today.
The misty, slightly pixellated images of the sky in "Swiping Clouds" by Sean Blagsvedt with help from Kiran D were projected on an architecturally large synthetic water tank whose muted whiteness permeated the darkly translucent video, while its circular volume evoked Buddhist prayer wheels. One could feel the excitement of making the image respond to one's gestures as well as sink into the meditative calm of the slow moving video itself.
"The Rain Game" by Gene Kogan, too, drew the visitor into the projection transposing him/her into a digital silhouette expected to fill with rain drops that kept coming on the screen. It may not have resulted in much serious questioning the water scarcity prospect, nonetheless led one's attention in the general direction.