Home/Transit

JohnyML looks at the artistic development of the noted young painter Binoy Verghese in a special article contributed to the catalogue for his solo show at the Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi

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Binoy Verghese

Binoy Verghese stood in a small queue that leads to the buffet table. He could hear the sounds of spoons clanging against the porcelain plates. But he was not listening. His eyes were fixed at the snow flakes falling silently against the wet neon light outside the dining hall. The skin of glass that separated Binoy from the grainy cold of snow was moistened. Binoy’s eyes were too moistened.

“Tomorrow, I am going back”, said Binoy while settling himself down with his plate near Kristine Bloomfield who had already found a chair near the window. The dim light that loomed over them added shades to the sharp contours of Kristine.

“Tomorrow…?” Kristine’s eyes widened. “Tomorrow…..,” she murmured.

Binoy looked at his right hand that was holding the fork. With a lot of care he scooped out a piece of chicken from the plate. Then he looked at her hand. Her skin was glowing.

Skin. The outer limit of one’s body, he thought. Skin that separated human being from human being. Skin that decided the geographical boundaries of one’s own identity. Binoy remembered a poem by the Malayalm poet, Balachandran Chullikkadu. This poet had never used English in his verses. But in this poem he used it with a lot of care.

“I am white
 You are brown
 But look,
 Our shadows are black.”

Binoy smiled. “Why are you smiling?” Kristine asked. “Nothing,” said Binoy.

White. Brown. Black. Shades of colours that he has used abundantly in his paintings. Each colour connoted a home. Perhaps, a home and the world. Each colour was a pointer to the skin. The skin of the painting. The skin of one’s own self. How do you explain skin to your viewer? How do you talk about home? How do you talk about transit lounges? Perhaps, you need to be a writer to say all these things. But Binoy was a painter and he had to find out a way.

“B-i-nnnoy…,” Kristine’s Dutch accent woke him out of the reverie. “It was very nice to have you here. I enjoyed your company.” Then she was silent for a moment.

“Sing that song for me, please,” she said.

Binoy knew which song she was intending; a Malayalam song, which he had never translated for her. He gulped wine from his glass. Then he looked at her. There was a faint smile at her face. She knew how he prepared himself before singing. Binoy widened his eyes for a moment. Then he closed them and raised his right hand. The curly cascade of his hair shivered. He sang:

“Vaadaka veedozhinju. Njanen vaadaka veedozhinju. Vaathil thazhittu, thakkol elpichu. Vedanayode padiyirangi njan, vedanayode padiyirangi…..”

His eyes were filled now. Kristine too was crying.

“Do you want to know the meaning of these lines?”

She did not say anything. Binoy heaved.

“I would like to explain it for you. ‘I am leaving my rented home, I am leaving my rented home. I locked the door and handed over the key to the landlord. With immense pain I climbed down the stairs. I climbed down the stairs.”

Escalators. Trolleys. Coffee smell. People. The solid flow of broken structures. They all turned into an optical flow of thickly coloured lines- yellow, red and black.

Binoy became a butterfly. He winged his way out of the transit lounge.

Down there Montreal transformed into an ocean of clouds. Good bye Canada.

History

The Canadian sojourn clearly demarcates Binoy’s oeuvre into two. During 1990s Binoy was painting a lot of images, which in painterly/art historical parlance oscillated between a strong sense of expressionism and a nostalgic understanding of the kitsch. A mutilated body appeared and reappeared in his works until it was transformed into a saintly body, glowing with membrane like white contours. He had virtually abandoned reds, blues and greens from his paintings. On the other end, he continued with a set of kitsch imageries, which recouped his childhood spent in rural Kerala. The images came in this series as if they were from a school primer. Colours were loud and perspective as a painterly technique was at the verge of a collapse. He metaphorically and prophetically called it ‘Chorakkuzy’ (the Pit of Blood).

Canada, for Binoy, was a place that helped him to reinvent himself. The agony of physical displacement mixed with a longing for the familiar put him to a situation that necessitated a thorough re-reading of his own existence as an artist as well as a human being. Perhaps, it was during this time that Binoy left painting as mode of expression and turned to the making of collages using digitally printed images. Those who observe the works of Binoy against its historical lineage could find it for sure that the foundation for his highly recognized works of recent times lay in those collages made out of digital prints. Overtly political, these works deal with the popular iconography of Indian pantheon of Gods. Here Binoy refers to the political pogroms that traumatized the Indians in general and minority communities in particular. The digital superimposition of ordinary people lamenting on the loss of their kith and kin with the pantheon of gods was cynical up to an extent but an urgency for the artist. Binoy brought these works back to India, rolled in many pipes. A gallerist came forward to exhibit these works only to back out soon for the fear of social ostracism that she might have faced in exhibiting them.

After coming back from Canada in 2000, Binoy Verghese started a new series of paintings that delineated his thoughts about home, transit and skin. He has recounted once how he viewed all those huge containers near the cargo station moved things and put them into the bellies of flights. How the escalators and trolleys carried people and their belongings. In the ‘nowhere’ place of a transit lounge, how he experienced the deeper meanings of ‘home’ and ‘skin’. For him, his skin was the home and for others the very same home was a marker that ‘distinguished’ his home/identity. In foreign shores and transit lounges, despite our multicultural and global claims, skin becomes a multimedia identity kit that explains everything about a person and his genealogy.

Keeping himself off from making harsh comments or falling for a romantic antagonistic positioning in relationship with the ‘other’, back ‘home’, Binoy tried to recapture the sense of being the ‘other’. He repeatedly painted images of containers, escalators and the people of Asian origin whom he befriended while he was in Canada. Mediatic realism was in vogue when Binoy started working on the new series. His indulgence with ‘mediatized images’ came much later though he referred to his personal albums to find adequate metaphors and images. Having trained in advertisement and popular painting, for Binoy, it was not difficult to handle that kind of artistic lingua, which was then generally called photorealism.

In 2002 and 2003, Binoy worked diligently to create a language, which could be identified as his signature style. It was during this time that he turned his attention from personal albums to more publicly transmitted images through the media. Soon, equipped with a digital camera Binoy started collecting images from the day to day life. Along with the moorings of home, homelessness also became a pivotal issue in his creative thoughts. He painted a destitute girl child sitting proudly on a dining table set in a palatial room. He made icons out of the deprived children and women in burqua (who are deprived of flaunting their body or face in public) who looked at the viewer intently. One cannot look at those paintings without a smile.

Binoy is not a painter of pathos. Nor is he a painter of social realism. He paints the issues closer to his heart. In the new suite of works (which are presented in this exhibition), Binoy harks to what his heart says; he paints the children, glowing in their dark and brown skin; the social marker of their existence. Burqua clad women send covert glances at the viewer, an invitation or a challenge. They feed pigeons (an age old symbol of piece!). The boy in his skull cap looks at the viewer, in anger or in suspicion. The cheap but colourful clothes and the bunch of flowers that the girls wear become celebratory. It all happens against flowering backdrops of desire and greeneries of hope. In this total spectacle of flowering, Binoy hides the questions he would like to ask. Where is the home? And what does the skin colour mean? Then artist bows and goes behind the curtain. But the questions linger on as the wailing of Bob Marley.

Theory

During a period when ‘photorealism’ (in art critical jargon, mediatic realism) as an art language passes through a process of self problematizing, it is interesting to watch Binoy earnestly exploring the same ‘problem language’. He creates verisimilitude of the images that he collects from the media and positions them in a new home; a wonderland. The iconicity that he imparts to his images renders the original or the source material somewhat obsolete.

Media carefully create homes for the convenient images. Recently, in an explosive unearthing of a photographic fraud in the media, a website cited many examples how the news agency major Reuters manipulated war time pictures for sentimentalizing the issue. The images of internal strife in Beirut circulated all over the world by Reuters turned out to be carefully cultivated images even with trained actors in war fatigues. The simulacrum that denies history to images in fact create a hyper-reality, which could refer back only to itself. The mediatic manipulation of history or the subversion of reality towards ulterior motives gets subverted, perhaps to reclaim its own history, while an artist further manipulates the mediatized images. Hyper-real representations in a work of art, in this sense, are strategic utterances to reclaim the ‘original home’. Binoy, by juxtaposing a hyper-real portrait with a hyper-real backdrop, in fact, makes an attempt to reclaim the home (both in notional and metaphorical ways) for the image and for himself.

Selecting dark or brown complexioned persons (including the portrait of Frida Kahlo) or women in Burqua with unidentifiable complexion (however, a burqua clad figure anticipates a brown skinned woman in it), Binoy postulates ‘body as information’. The physical body of a person has become the embodiment of information regarding his ‘identities’. Had biometric information been used once to locate a criminal, now it has become a tool to control and categorize the global mobility of human beings. Biometric data production, digitization and informatization of personal details etc have rendered the human body a ‘moving passport.’ Binoy addresses these issues through iconic placement of dark complexioned persons (a universal marker for criminals, aliens, migrants, coolies, deprived and destitute) in his pictorial planes. One is reminded of an episode from the life of MalcolmX where he refers through the dictionaries to find the definition of the word ‘black’ and finds all negative connotations!

Binoy’s works in the present suite embody a challenge and redemption. He challenges the traditionally held views like body as the abode of soul or black is ugly. He challenges the mediatized images of women as ‘timeless’ beauties. He redeems his protagonists by putting them to the places where they ‘belong’. By pushing the very portrait to the lower ends of the canvas, at times, Binoy displaces all what could be called ‘beautiful’ and brings his heartfelt issues to the fore. In his works, Binoy celebrates life, history, home and skin.

(Courtesy Palette Art Gallery, New Delhi)