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The Sublime Rebellion
In the image infested world, George’s paintings are a silent rebellion. A poet and painter, George create moodscapes that invite the onlooker to contemplate on being and becoming. His new works are on display at the Durbar Hall Art Gallery, Kochi. C.S.Venkiteswaran explains the philosophy of George’s works.
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“…the boundaries between self and world are dissolved in the ‘play’ of signs and representations. We have an excess of images and signs. But why is it that we are not simply lost in all this? Why, indeed is it possible to enjoy the whole spectacle? I would answer: because it is sublime in the Kantian sense. The sensory and imaginative excess can be comprehended as an idea. It revivifies our capacity for rational insight – our very ability to create and discover meaning. In a curious way, indeed, this aesthetic response to the patterns of contemporary culture, is one which can resist their potentially desensitizing and dehumanizing effects…”
Paul Crawther, The Postmodern Sublime
Why create yet another image/narrative when the world is flooded with it? Why should I add another of mine to it and what? If at all I have to, how do they get to be seen, leave alone reflected upon? As just another image in this deluge? These questions ought to be haunting any image-maker today..
The aesthetic or resistant responses to the contemporary visual culture that engulfs and dissolves all discernment and reflection and feeds on constant titillation and never-ending movement have been many and diverse. On the one, there have been attempts to turn the tables on it as it were – to use fragments to deal with the fragmentariness of contemporary experience and life. Or, sometimes it has resorted to a sort of stark, graphic realism – one that forces the viewer to look at the world and its images in all its unique goriness/nakedness and also beauty and splendour.
As against this predominant culture of excess – of colour, figures, images, details, ornamentations and titillation – George’s paintings veer away into a mode of being that employs extreme minimalism and economy. But it is not a minimalism of mere protest and counterpoint, but also one that invites the viewer into the rich layeredness of every minutiae of reality – of colours, planes, tones, surfaces and moods…By avoiding figuration in the conventional sense, his works emphasizes its textures and patterns, thus gradually drawing us into its intense moodscapes. In his own words, “I believe that every act in life becomes spiritual by experiencing it directly. Spirituality is inherent in life. Art process makes it visible and direct. Every colour, every line, spaces in between and around, are so direct and intimate that spirituality is a bodily experience for me. When a particular colour is used or a line is drawn in a particular way or a brush stroke is done in a particular manner – these particularities are not created by any particular elements, but by wholeness. This wholeness is the spirituality of the body. Body is not imagining or re-imagining, it is simply an entity of experiences- clear, spontaneous, and path-breaking.”
This need for an invitation/incitement into reflection and contemplation is an act of resistance – resistance to the flood of transient but constantly alluring/shifting images/narratives that we soak/live in.
In his works, the physical world or ‘reality’ often remains and persists in the form of a blot – it is often a counter point and an anchor. Mostly it is a very bold and definitive brush stroke in an otherwise formless colour mass, terrains and surfaces, or it is a distant, misty and shadowy trace (a shard of memory of the Real?) that seems to try to emerge out of the formlessness or receding into it. They gather unto themselves a stubbornness or indissolvability – like a wound, a trace of resistant self or life that we yearn to dissolve in every experience.
An engagement with George’s paintings calls for critical and silent reflection. Their pace – painting also have pace – is slow and circuitous, leading or spiraling the viewer around and deeper into its world. By keeping its organic integrity, each painting is an act of resistance towards the fragmentariness and evanescence of contemporary, pop-commercial, ‘mainstream’ visual cultural products. If the latter is crowded with images, details, anecdotes and figures, George’s work totally does away with such bits of reality. It instead believes in the most fundamental of painting’s elements – tonalities of colour, tensions and dynamics of the surface and the layering of planes.
Even colours take on a very enigmatic incarnation in his recent paintings. While resisting the carnivalesque of colours, George tries to retrieve colours, using them sparingly and with extreme care, with a profound sense of ‘respect’ and feeling. Working on the different shades of otherwise ‘loud’ colours, he moves away from using them ‘against’ other colours to create energies of ‘conflict’, something contemporary visual culture is attuned to. Instead he works his way through their tonalities and light scales, like a raga vistara that constantly shifts scales between whisper tones to breathless intensitites. Like in the rendering of a rage, they are repetitive but always working at different planes, and always spiraling out to the world and into our depths.
“Art approaches as a saving and healing enchantress. She alone is able to transform these nauseating reflections on the awfulness or absurdity of existence into representations wherewith it is possible to live; these are representations of the sublime as the artistic subjugation of the awful…” - Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
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