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Capturer of Visions

Binu Bhaskar is a loner in the field of contemporary photography. He has been seriously pursuing his interest in photography of the last fifteen years. With the solo show hosted by Bodhi Art Gallery, New Delhi in February 2008, Binu is all set to make it big in the contemporary art scene. JohnyML profiles the artist and his works.

Binu Bhaskar

Binu Bhaskar is a photographer based in space and time. Born in Kerala, after his formal school education and graduation, he has been traveling all over the world in search of that alchemy which would help him to convert what he sees (visuals) into visions. Bitten by travel bug, Binu backpacked to several art centers in India, acquainting himself with artists and their respective art forms. Then he found himself in Australia, studying photography in one of the illustrious art institutions. Ten long years he spent there, found his wife and begot a son. Circumstances took him to Dubai where he became the leading photographer for the international advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi. He drew phenomenal amounts as his remuneration. Suddenly, one day he decided to say good bye to the world of advertising for pursuing his own call, creating visions out of mere visuals.

Back in India, Binu found a thriving art scene but still reluctant to take serious photography into its fold. Artists like Valsan Koorma Kolleri, Bose Krishnamachari and so on recognized his talent and extended their support by providing him with shelters in Kerala, Mumbai and Delhi. Now he has his first major solo show in Bodhi Art Gallery, New Delhi in February 2008. And he likes to title his solo ‘Sap Consciousness’. Playing with the words ‘Sub’ and ‘Sap’ Binu would like to get into the core of what is seen through naked eyes and through the practiced eye of the camera. Sap is the essence of nature, the life blood of the plant kingdom that yield fruits for all who have the tenderness to pluck away with the fruits with a prayer. Sap fills the fruits with essence and when it is time sap itself forces the fruit to fall for the common good. Sap consciousness then is the supreme consciousness for Binu and it excels the automatism of sub-consciousness.

Binu’s works are panoramic frames of nature, perhaps the nature framed by a traveler’s eyes. This panoramic view, a stretched 180 degree vision often seen through a moving vehicle (especially a train), however is an impossible view as practically the human eyes cannot capture all what is given in the 180 degree stretch. It is always less that the 180 degree and hence what we call a panoramic view is not a panoramic view. For Binu, attaining this 180 degree vision is almost like attaining the truth of what is perceived. When one consciously views all what is contained in the 180 degree, things take a new form, new permutations and combinations are established, the thing-ness of things are revealed and also the truth of nature is established. Binu’s panoramic views aspire to reach this conscious viewing, thereby restructuring the perceived into the realm of conceptual.

The river basins, paddy fields, muddy pools, sky, trees, thickets, undergrowths, religiously protected small forests, temples and all what is peculiar to an agricultural society constitute Binu’s image repertoire. Within the panoramic format, these images lose their representation qualities (though they strongly remind a familiar viewer of the dying paddy fields in Kerala) and take the shapes of geometrical forms which in certain ways are emblematic of the ritualistic nature of an agrarian community. With technical aid and mathematical precision, Binu converts the limitation of the human eyes into a possibility of panoramic viewing. Same images are mutated to reveal the underlying truths of nature, which are manifested in the geometrical shapes and forms. The paddy stacks that sprout from the fields transform themselves into decorative patterns that herald the artist’s affinity for the aboriginal art, which he had familiarized while living in Australia.

The ritualistic essence of the agrarian imagination however is not an end in itself for Binu. Transcending it into the phenomenology of perception, Binu philosophizes the act of perceiving and comprehending. For him a visual remains in the realm of words and literature unless and until it is experienced as a vision, where the agency of literature is nullified. In the general perception, nature is ‘read’ and ‘understood’ as a set of internalized verbal codes unlike music which is set in time but heard within and without time. The visuals are circumscribed with temporality and the hard task of the artist is to break this temporal bonding and release the visuals to a field of visions. Binu’s works facilitate this release by breaking the time-space unity. Temporal and spatial unity helps the human eyes to read visuals as comprehensive entities and in brain each visual is decoded into words. Binu reiterates that so long as a visual is ‘read’ into words, it fails to manifest as a vision, which is more experiential than perceptive.

Perhaps, that is why Binu’s paintings (which are rarely exhibited for he treats them as a private field of colors and forms, his first attempt to understand the music of visuals without the agency of words) contain gestural daubing of colors, which could almost inform him of the essence of the 180 degree view of things. These paintings, for Binu are a secondary field of visuals craving for transcendence from where he could reach to the final experience of vision, only to give physical manifestation of it in his photographs later on. Anyone who wields a camera could click visuals but an artist like Binu, clicking and registering one visual does not mean photography for he quite firmly believes that what camera registers is only a visual not a vision in itself. He even disputes the informed and studied angle/perspective taken by a trained photographer (not only in technique but in the critical history of photography also) for the simple reason that though such photographs could generate a chain of significations they could never contain the essence of what is being perceived.

Taking the permuted visuals and the resultant visions out of the realm of signification problematizes Binu’s photography further. If signification is not his primary aim and touching upon the essence of the truth-value of things plays a predominant role in these works, how do his works function in a society where his works are not viewed in his terms? It becomes a prerequisite that signification in many ways reestablishes the materiality of the very signs that constitute the visuals and this materiality is what Binu tries to expunge from his works. Even, taken in terms of beauty, Binu’s attempt is not to recreate what is beautiful in the perceived reality but to evoke the experience of beauty in unbridled perception itself.

In Sap Consciousness, there is a play of sub-consciousness. Many of the images that Binu reveals through his photographic visions are subconscious take off from his previous photographic works. Binu has always been interested in taking the pictures of abandoned objects, places and buildings. Many of them have strong geometrical compositions within them, mostly constituted by the play of objects, colors and light. The continuity of artistic vision happens in Binu’s present series sub-consciously and that add to the clarity to his visions.