Inexplicable Twirls of Serifs
Rajan, who once blithely dismissed artists as “immature people, out of touch with reality,” was inadvertently drawn to graphic design and screen printing prior to his undergraduate studies. As a junior student at Ottappalam NSS College in the late 1980s, he used to frequent the Kerala Book Centre at Shoranur, where he found a mentor, Mohanan, who while supplying him with Indian ink and pencils earnestly critiqued his amateurish cartoon caricatures and ardently discussed aesthetics of creative designs.
Mohanan referred him to the letterpress artist at a type foundry in Shoranur, where Rajan was initiated into the intricacies of typography, font design and graphics. Within a month the young apprentice was well-equipped to create typefaces and take up commercial assignments. Instant approval for a cover design for “A1 Coffee” brand was a heady start to a three-hours-a-day part-time job for the pre-degree student.
It also emboldened him to claim that he was an artist when the college principal, Professor Sreeramamenon, enquired about his special avocation during the admission procedure for a degree course in Economics. The deference with which the principal treated the promising cartoonist and graphic designer was to transform his life forever.
The village boy from Pallikkal, near Cheruthuruthy – a cultural landmark thanks to Kalamandalam, an institution internationally acclaimed for reviving Kerala’s traditional dance drama, Kathakali, and the “dance of the enchantress,” Mohiniattam – in Thrissur district, saw his own profile change dramatically with this artistic anointment. The principal entrusted him with most of the creative design work for the upcoming jubilee celebrations of the college. He pulled “the unseen strings” behind the mysterious in-house cartoonist trio who became a rage in the campus with their ‘Humour Week’ display. He was also inducted into the core team of student leaders, and became the editor of the college magazine, as the Student Federation of India made a big comeback in the campus cultural front after a two-decade long gap. (Rajan was self-confessedly “converted to the revolutionary ideology” the moment he laid his hands on a glazed red leather-bound Lenin biography that cost him just two Indian rupees!)
Rajan, who was virtually untutored in drawing or painting as his rural school did not have a drawing teacher in its rolls, swept all the first prizes in drawing, watercolour, clay modeling, and oil painting at the Calicut University Youth Festival and was crowned with the overall champion’s Kalaprathibha title. One of the jury members, Unni Menon, a widely travelled connoisseur of art, had sought Rajan out after the competitions, and personally invited him home. At his aristocratic house, Menon had a surprise award for Rajan: A priceless collection of books, including Lust for Life by Irving Stone, the book on Vincent Van Gogh’s life and art , supplemented with all his letters; Pablo Picasso’s Pink and Blue Periods; Rembrandt; and Modigliani among the painters “under a curse” (peintres maudits).
A magnificent window to magical splendours was suddenly thrown open for him!
Crossing the Rubicon
Although he had completed his degree course in Economics, Rajan opted out of the university exam. He knew he had irrevocably crossed the Rubicon.
Even as he drifted along with certain ideological currents and at times furiously grappled with some unresolved issues in life while spearheading solidarity campaigns like “Free Mandela” – joining the international cry for the South African freedom fighter’s release from Apartheid jail, designing and printing thousands of badges and personally urging local bus passengers to wear them, only to feel slightly dejected later on by seeing just a feeble shadow of the heroic icon emerge into the limelight – Rajan had firmly set his sights on his destiny.
His main agenda was art, and the immediate target a bachelor’s degree in fine arts - painting from the Government College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram. “It was truly mind-blowing! The art milieu in Thiruvananthapuram was so alive, the freedom so refreshing! There was a cultural explosion. Poetry, literature, theatre, intellectual campaigns, film societies, festivals.... during the Centenary of World Cinema, over 100 world classics were shown; and we saw all of them. The cosmopolitan scene could mould you in so many splendid ways,” recalls Rajan.
And finally he could exorcise all his misgivings about “bohemian” artists. He found himself interacting with a new class of very elegant, dignified and self-assured senior artists. “It was the Post-Radical phase. Some of its main protagonists were now in our midst, we could debate its failures with them without any inhibition. They gave you such aesthetic outreach and historical perspectives. The college library, too, was incomparable, a rich treasure trove. Nobody taught you any techniques; you were expected to invent your own. Even the most junior students were then assuming master status and comparing their work with that of Picasso. Such a liberating experience!”
In contrast, Baroda, where he enrolled at the MS University for a master’s degree in fine arts - painting, turned out a rather bleak patch for Rajan. “I was tormented …mainly by poverty. There was a personal anguish, deep pain and some losses…My father had died…And there was this nagging self-doubt.” Rajan recounts how he struggled with a compulsive need to revise an urban landscape on 8ft x 6ft canvas 12 times. “Peter Boven, a sculptor who was then in the fine arts faculty, requested me to let him photograph each revision so that he could track its progress and make some sense out of the crazy situation.”
Rajan had to find material resources for his survival. He had sold his staple-gun for Rs800 earlier as he was packing off to Baroda. A friend who had come to the railway station said consolingly during the farewell: “You don’t lose what you don’t have.” Strangely, those words resounded in Rajan’s mind when he confronted challenges head-on, with the aggressiveness of someone who had nothing to lose. Like some of his colleagues, Rajan could earn enough money for his upkeep by taking up part-time fabric painting for a boutique that exported its products.
“The hardships had some positive effect. It made me philosophical,” Rajan deadpans. “Such experiences give you a lot of energy. It teaches you how to withstand any circumstances. It also equips you to share many concerns.”
Zone of Bittersweet Sequences
Rajan was determined to come back home – unlike most of the Keralite wannabe stars and some hot favourites and legitimate celebrities in the contemporary Indian art circuit who often angled for more lucrative metro markets far away from their home state. Although he was “adrift and floating” in his stake-out for a mooring, he found his niche through sheer professional commitment.
For Rajan, art practice is a very serious, conscious act. “Art cannot bring revolution; it works subtly.” And he let his paintings do the subtle magic.
Strange as it may seem, he had deliberately avoided collecting his fine arts degree certificate “lest I be tempted to enlist myself for a cosy job in a weak moment.” However, he consented to be a guest lecturer at the Fine Arts College, Thiruvananthapuram, for a short stint.
Meanwhile, a dream project – a mega show featuring 25 major artists – was planned, with 10 people assuring to pitch in the finances. Rajan took up the responsibility to contact all the artists and collect the exhibits. The works began to arrive, some wholeheartedly contributing two or three pieces each. While Rajan went ahead with the schedule and fulfilled his part of the deal, he found to his dismay, except for NN Rimzon all the other organisers were dragging their feet. Rimzon stood with him all along, but then they were forced to call off the exhibition. It was indeed heartbreaking.
Rajan had to resolve another persistent problem: fungus threat. He suspected that the mould came from some particular pigments. He began testing the effect of various colour patches in rolled up canvas. It took almost a year to find a remedy.
After Baroda, in Trivandrum Rajan had worked on watercolour miniatures. The raw texture of handmade paper enhanced the fragmentary format. Essentially, the miniatures on scrapbook sheaves and such small-size creations came about as “that was the art that you could carry with you when you are a drifter; you can put it in your bag or inside a book and get going.” Interestingly, stamp-size miniatures were already in store for Rajan to quickly dispatch in “gift boxes” when call came for Sahmat’s Gift for India show in New Delhi in 1997, commemorating the Golden Jubilee of Indian Independence. The work looked like a Contact-print taken from film negative. There were about 18 frames, and all that had little burning objects as central image.
Not restricted to any particular medium, Rajan has always tried various blends and techniques while evolving his painting style. At times he uses black tea stains for a very effective golden tint. “Each medium has its own merits. And it would seem acrylic is the most appropriate one to reflect contemporary nature.”
An Album of Drawings and Paintings, works of 10 painters of Kerala that included NN Rimzon, Jyothibasu, VN Aji and Rajan among others, held at the Draavidia Art and Performance Gallery Mattancherry in 1999, signified something of a paradigm shift in the contemporary art scene in Kochi. Suddenly, a new energy was sweeping in. A new crop of promising artists was emerging in the scene.
A grand opening with a gathering of over 700 people greeted Bose Krishnamachari for his De Curating show in Kochi, attesting once again to Rajan’s blind faith in a Kerala resurgence in contemporary art networking. It prompted Bose to bring a horde of young celebrity artists from Mumbai to Kochi for a stupendous Bombay x 17 show at Kashi Art Gallery. Establishing such a strong pan-national link was one of Rajan’s prophetic dreams while he decided to set up his studio in Kochi.
Rajan won the Kerala Lalithakala Akademi award in 2001 for a stunningly poignant visual, a huge 12ft x 4ft panel that included two landscapes depicting three children playing in a paddy, and three portraits of a six-year-old girl, a victim of sectarian violence in rural Malabar. “It was my response to the painful tragedy, the politics of violence. But the surprising element was that although Asna, the girl who lost a leg in the bomb blast, got a relentless coverage in the media, accompanied by graphic visuals on television, when her realistic portrait was presented after a few months in my award-winning panel, nobody recognised her. So much for our social and political memory!”
Here, again, art functions to reconnect you to memories. It reminds you, in a loud visual explosion, about the struggle against forgetting. “With such a large format, you don’t have to look at the painting; the painting looks at you. The painting gives you a space. People should feel their own life reflected in it. Not distorted or stylised, you become one of the characters.”
Rajan had desperately “searched for a wall” to display the huge visual, suggesting some of his friends that they could take it home with them. However, such a work of art couldn’t be just gifted away thus.
Charcoal in De-Mystified Hyper-Realism
Remembering is often suffused with emotion. Moving from full-shot narrative imageries to arresting close-ups, Little Black Drawings, Rajan’s first solo exhibition mounted by Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi, in 2004 and comprising 27 graphic representations, all done in compressed charcoal and serigraphy on hand-made paper, had evolved from a long process of storing contemporary life images.
Working on a detailed, affective, temporal and contextual frame of reference, these visual documents, significantly labelled as Citizens and Clippings, were abounding in their ashen subtleties and intricate heterogeneity of subjective memory experiences. Unadorned and hard-edged, these fragmented syntax of reconstructed episodes embedded in time and space strangely turns into a probing inquiry of human predicaments.
“A disturbing clipping of a man running from a blast site could make you wonder who this man is. Then, suddenly it becomes a question of your own identity. You begin to question the very notion of identity – community, religion, nationality. Once these are wiped out, what is your identity? What is the label I bear? Maybe, you’re just asking the question, not trying to get an answer,” says Rajan.
Kathleen Wyma, Vancouver-based art historian who has been diligently profiling Rajan’s stupendous evolution as a world-class artist, wrote in her prologue to the Little Black Drawings show: “The visual nuances of his drawings express a poetic cadence that allegorises the contradictions of social circumstance. I find the play on the corporeal – the social body, the body of humanity – the dismembered texts that float through the images most provocative.”
Along with a clinical perspective, Rajan brings in unexpected depth and resonance to a drawing by imaginative contrasts or juxtaposition. Thus you find a beautiful clipping of a happy group of smiling schoolgirls offset by a diametrically opposite image of a young man cocking his gun with cold intent.
The choice of the medium – charcoal – was deliberate: “The basic question was whether I could create a work of art if I don’t have the wherewithal. Even some great masters, like Van Gogh, for instance had to resolve this problem. He used charcoal and white chalk. Well, I didn’t have the money, and I had to work. It was some kind of a regimen, training myself to get going under any circumstances. Besides, I also wished that my friends could afford to buy my drawings!”
In retrospect, he seems genuinely grateful for the experience. And with a warm, cherubic glint in his eyes, he acknowledges “the generous contributions” from Renu Ramanath, journalist and art critic, who became his Muse and life-partner, a steady bond that grew out of professional interaction. “Renu was a source of great strength and sustenance for me as well as a number of my artist-friends who would pass by,” he says.
In this tremulous twilight, Rajan marks a fleeting stroke with his thin brush on the ashen canvas. Now the painting begins to suggest itself like a nightmarish memory, for, as Milosz would say “to exist on earth is beyond any power to name.”
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