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| Still, I Love You - Exhibition View |
I have been visiting Shridhar Iyer's studio over some years
now, and every time I realise that it a very different kind of space, a kind we
are not used to these days. Most
established artists have a very clear home studio distinction, and in this
distinction, their homes have become much-sanitised spaces. However, every time
I visit Shridhar Iyer's studio, I feel as if I have walked into a magician's
house where life, art and spiritualism come into one melting pot, and a spell
is being cooked or being imagined. The studio is an intrinsic part of his
practice and his exploration of abstraction. Over the years, the artist has taken up
studios, built them from scratch, lived in them, produced shows, and then just
let it all go...moving into a new place with just a suitcase and starting all
over again. This reflects an artistic philosophy exploring the journey between the possibilities of assimilation and letting go. Over the last decade, Iyer has been working
around the disconnect between nature and civilization, a disconnect which for
the artist symbolises our inability to understand the forces of the universe
and our place inside it. Tambulam, his new body of works is his offering to
nature, as well as healing touch to the bonds which are on the verge of being
lost forever.
Shridhar Iyer is one of the rare modern masters whose works
have been trendsetters for postmodern and contemporary art practices in India.
Known to be one of the greatest living abstractionists in India, Iyer's art
practice has always gone beyond pictorial abstraction and he is one of the
earliest artists from the subcontinent to embrace installation and video as an
integral part of his practice. The
artist explores pure contemplation on a spiritual level, almost as a window to
the unknown energy and force of the universe. His ability to rasp philosophical
abstraction is extraordinary and his works show his painterly deftness as he
juxtaposes strong and fragile colours in complete harmony.
"The lines and
forms of tribal art always play with the idea of meaning and reality; the forms
invent their own geometry based on their context, play and rhythm. I realised that to be an artist, one has to
go beyond mirroring reality and only through developing an extremely personal
language, and one can generate new forms and meanings for the world.... what
tribal art taught me is that through spontaneity and rhythm, lines could be
transformed into something magical. You
could say that since then, the 'line' has become key to my artistic practice;
it helps me to explore and understand my own imagination. Over the years I have
grown to realise that possibilities of new forms and ideas are deeply embedded
in the exploration of 'line'."
Shridhar Iyer
In Iyer’s artistic practice,
there has always been an attempt to propose an alternative to the contemporary
fascination with the spectacular image. Since his early days at Bharat Bhawan,
though his paintings, drawings, videos and installations, Iyer has been a part
of aesthetic trajectories which nurtured painterly abstraction as a mode to
develope languages different from the figurative, data dense visual culture
with images that are designed to jump at you, craving for that attention that
bounces off into the recesses of your overfed conscious. His works have
explored between chaos and calmness with an emphasis on tactility and
playfulness. This life lived in an
overdose of spectacles has numbed our senses forever. When we travel we are
busy clicking and hardly ever just seeing. Our eyes cannot rest and are constantly
bored. In these times Iyer's works have offered us a different mode of seeing.
This mode of seeing is not only operational in the viewer, but has had to be
first digested by the artist. The painted surface is not just a residue of
pictorial mark making and rendering, it is also a reflection of the artist own
gaze, the way he engages with the world, and how images form inside our head.
The manner in which he mixes his media, the self-consciousness about the aesthetic
values of Form and possibilities of play, and the manner in which he
appropriates the spiritual and the political into the ‘painterly’; speak of a
deep entrenchment into the history of visual vocabularies. Deeply influenced by
modernism and tribal art Iyer extends awareness of the historical/aesthetic
frameworks of social consciousness and the subversion of the spectacular. This
consciousness is significant it a time when aesthetic consciousness become
marginal in the globalised imaginations and desires. The works celebrate a
resistance to the homogenization of the human condition. It is this postmodern
critique of contemporary, which strongly marks Tambulam as an artistic
intervention.
The installations in the show
are layered with prayer, wishes, nostalgia and love. 'Still, I Love You' and Ámia and Champa Trees
are steeped in a sense of deep loss and endless hope. This dialogue between hope and loss is a
layering of Iyer's relationship with assimilating and letting go. Wood becomes
an important metaphor and so do shadows. It is difficult to understand whether
they stand in anticipation or in defeat, but both contain prayer and a
song. They are attempts of the artist to
remind himself, stretch the envelope of his spirituality to be able to retain
hope even as one remains a witness to the Anthropocene. Yet, for the artist, there are no gaps between
the personal, the spiritual and the political, he seeks to negotiate the space through
beauty, balance and hope.
Tambulam is a complex body of work, a lot of it is in
continuation of the artist's explorations over last five to six years, yet in
this body, there are also seeds of the new directions where Iyer's practice is
heading towards. His art is becoming more conceptual and one can see a
conscious attempt to experiment with pushing the boundaries of drawing and
painting as separate forms. In his paintings,
leisure and hints of boredom become fundamental to the experience of time and
problems of meaning, creating that hint of tension between notions of
existence, consumption and taste. The artist is able to arrive at the visual language that goes beyond exploring the self with the paint and the line
as the primary tools, here we see artist trying to communicate the thin, almost invisible state of interdependence
and order that guides all transitions of life.
Abstraction, for Iyer is not just a visual language, but a
strategy that initiates dialogue compassion and understanding. In this respect,
'Tambulam' is not just a body of works, but a space which the artist offers,
pushing us to rethink our relationship with the Anthropocene. The show presents
drawings, paintings and installations stylistically ranging from gestural to
minimal. Iyer has always made art as a
way of connecting to the cosmos, as an endeavour to expand his spiritual self.
Yet nature is an integral part of the cosmos, and as the artist realises how
fragile it has become, it brings out of Iyer a mellow, tender reaction, almost
like singing a song to an ill parent, sad yet hopeful. A large set of very fine drawings, largely
monochromatic, aesthetically anchor the show. They are like gentle drifting,
the marks on paper become a residue of the artist's
process of seeing, hiding, masking, and preserving. The exhibition is
carefully constructed through interplay of form, colour and media centered on
the conceptual metaphors of nature and hope.
Rahul Bhattacharya
Spring 2019
New Delhi
