M.Sashidharan

Baroda based art critic Sandhya Bordewekar sheds lights on the new works of M.Sashidharan, who is having a solo show with the Viart Gallery in New Delhi

For a long while now, the identity of Sashidharan the painter had been submerged by that of Sashidharan the teacher, the glass sculptor, the muralist. Sometimes one saw a modest-sized painting here and there in group shows but that served more as a reminder of his being a painter rather than of any direction that he seemed to be taking as a painter. So the sms-ed invite to see his work at the Faculty of Fine Arts’ exhibition hall came as a surprise and to know that this was actually a preview for a full-scale solo at Viart, New Delhi, was even better.

The solo is titled “The Edge” and comprises large format oils on canvas and an installation that brings together digital images re-worked in the Photoshop software and an animated video loop that is projected on the floor of the gallery. In the installation, titled “Gandhi must Walk”, Sashidharan uses a photographic image of the cement cast of the Gandhi statue sculpted by Prof. Sankho Chaudhuri many decades back, which stood at the Faculty of Fine Arts for a number of years before it fell to pieces and was removed. The statue depicted Gandhi in his characteristic striding pose with one foot in front of the other. Somebody had wrapped a coil of barbed wire around the feet. The irony struck Sashidharan who photographed just the feet with the barbed wire (which are easily recognizable as the Mahatma’s), and created the animation of a single staccato movement of the raised foot moving only forward. The multiple photo images are placed at the ‘feet-level’ of the viewer (as against the usual eye-level), in an arrowhead of convergence at a wall corner with the video projected on the floor in the angle thus formed. This installation has developed, rather matured, out of an earlier image used by Sashi for a work created for the “Voices Against Violence” exhibition put up by the Baroda artists in response to the communal violence in Gujarat in 2002.

The large oils on canvas continue to focus on the existentialist concerns of the artist (who as a student stood at the colliding junction of the narrative and Radical group), now made even sharper by the prevailing atmosphere of globalization in which the rich-poor divide is made increasingly un-bridgeable. In visual language these get translated in surrealistic imagery – the maze, cage, barren landscapes, carnivorous flora, or as in “…He drove the Lion way”, a man sitting atop a pillar with a whip in his hand. In works such as “Corporate” and “Barcode”, the market-hungry, consumptive global beast raises its head most obviously. The little manipulative strategies of luring, entrapping the victim into believing that he has got a ‘better deal’ so that he is further caught as the perpetrator mocks from the sidelines, are here clearly outlined. The dark, formal jacket-clad hand as it hangs nonchalantly over a sofa (“Corporate”) and the ‘bed of arrows’ that the innocuous barcode on supermarket products is transformed into (“Barcode”), have been intelligently formulated and sharply worked out.

I must say that it is after a long time one has read a catalogue essay written straight from the heart yet with a fine sense of intellectual detachment and objectivity at the right places, and language that is crisp and articulate. Piyush A. Thakkar, once Sashidharan’s student and now a practicing painter in Baroda, presents his teacher’s several avatar-s -- as a human being, a teacher, a painter, and finally the creator of “The Edge”, with compassion, understanding and a sharp critical insight.