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C S Venkiteswaran writes about the works of A.S.Sajith, a Trivandrum based artist and his attempts to inscribe metaphysical meanings over material realities. The aerial views predominantly seen in Sajith’s works makes the viewer, think about his own insignificance and interconnectedness to the spirit and matter, says the author.

Kari n: charcoal, elephant, blackness, plough, number 8, a type of cultivation, a kind of facial make up

KARI – A S Sajith’s exhibition of drawings and paintings at Vyloppilli Sanskriti Bhavan, Thiruvananthapuram (November 18 – 22) features some very intense woks on charcoal and a few paintings that pursue the ‘cognitive mappings’ of charcoal in oil and acrylic on canvas.

The medium of charcoal has a sort of elemental and primal quality to it. Working with the most basic elements of image-making and the most basic of colour scheme – black markings on white surface, charcoal’s renderings of images evoke some sense of pre-historicity in our minds, triggering subterranean visions and unconscious fears.

Almost all the charcoal works of Sajith are panoramic in their viewpoint; they take up extreme high angle views of the world. They are sometimes cityscapes and other times mountains and other landscapes seen from above. Trees, buildings and other structures populate these drawings, and they are all cold and miniscule within their expansive setting. Even while they loom large over the living beings around them – who are tinier still in scale, almost ant-like – within the total frame these structures themselves are dwarfed by the high angle view and made insignificant, one among many. They seem to remain as mere repetitions or meaningless multiplications of themselves, amplifying our vision in the process.

They are in a way just like the faces that populate the canvas in the series ‘Conversation with Andy Warhol’. It is a multiplicity of faces – portraits that have certain poignantly introvert quality to them. For, none of these faces look at us or anything at all. They seem incapable of stares and have their eyes closed or fixed in glances that go sideways, passing tangentially to ours. They seem to refuse to look back and remain reticent – possibly as a counterpoint or in insignificance, as if in response to the immensity and also inhumanity of the spaces that surround and envelop them, as imaged in the other series.

In the series ‘Scenes from cognitive brain’, the visual effect is again distant and from extreme top angles that look down upon the vegetation and life below. This distance nurtures a kind of cold ruthlessness about it, a standpoint that accords the viewer a certain detachment. The motif of the grid is one that appears in Sajith’s works. It winds itself around landscapes and cityscapes, fixing, limiting and keeping them off bounds as it were. It sometimes looks like our bloody innards, and sometimes like barbed wires that envelop the world, setting it off against us and ominously looming between us and the world, our self and experience.

Human figures when they appear are either made miniscule both by the distance of the look or by the huge towering structures that surround them or the expanse of the spaces they are part of. In ‘Scenes from Cognitive brain’ human figures are just an extension of the landscape – mere insects crawling over the surface. When they appear closer, male figures are ‘written over’ with esoteric symbols and marks that entwine their bodies, working their way, like the grid over the landscapes, through the male body that stares at or embraces the female figures.

The visual effect that these drawings and paintings evoke is similar to a trance or a nightmare that is borne out of a sort of faraway-ness and cold stillness that they exude. It is an impassioned look that surveys from above and captures strange visions – reminding us of our own insignificance and also simultaneously our connectedness or embeddedness in this life-world that we happen to inhabit. It is an experience where the material of our sight turns into the matter of vision.

In Sajith’s own words “matter to me appears as condensed potential energy, body as the extension of consciousness and time and space as historical processes. So I am not focused on the serendipity resulting from the play of the material but more focused on the play of particles as matter and how conscious mind maps metaphysical narratives over matter” So the endeavor is to go beyond material to the sensations of matter and the metaphysical narratives that conscious mind maps over it”.