The Big City Blues
Chennai based artist, Pradeep Cherian recently had a solo show with the Apparao Galleries. Pradeep’s works are inspired by the angst of the contemporary man destined to live in city crowds. Undeniably Pradeep’s visual language has the potency to make the viewer reflect philosophically on questions of existence and questions of freedom, says Dr. Ashrafi S.Bhagat.
The exhibition titled “Music and Messiah” at Apparao Galleries, Chennai, evokes a sense of medieval piety, but the artist Pradeep Cherian has engaged with the metaphor of music and messiah to actively convey asymmetry of socio-cultural reality. Music references to the genre of Jazz that has a history associated with the struggle of the Blacks in America against the white hegemony. The messiah offers the metaphorical journey through life by conflating the cultural significance of the Stations of the Cross. Music as an abstraction is not represented by splashes of colours to convey the appropriate emotions, rather Pradeep has engaged with his ideology to represent those famous jazz masters who played an active and revolutionary role in fight against social injustice by creating a gallery of sketched and painted portraits with their instrument, as metonymies in struggle at all levels.
Pradeep has taken on the role of an activist artist who belligerently intercedes through his art, to speak, so to say about injustice, prejudice, class struggles and other social mores conflagrating man to remove these biases and indiscrimination. Within this milieu the traditional notion of singular heroic identity no longer does justice to the complexity of social relationships in contemporary society. The situation of the ‘lonely crowd’ or ‘of isolation in the mass’ as Jacques Eluil points out is the basic situation today. The ‘lonely man’ is the essential man and the larger crowd he lives, more isolated he is.
The metaphor offered through the Stations of the Cross bespeaks eloquently of this isolation in a crowd abandoned as Christ was, marking individual’s journey through life where he remains perpetually locked by angst and stress within the social, familial or cultural traditions. The visual vocabulary Pradeep deploys is equally appropriate, namely the steel mesh a ubiquity in making fences. The wired mesh offers a site for the construction of individual’s identity and location within the society. The woven net allows partial visibility and no freedom of movement confining the individual to his particular location. In addition he heighten the complexity of the whole by painting a bird which is neither in front nor behind the mesh and the perpetual question remains - am I inside or outside? Or who am I?
The works offer not only visual complexity but also a conceptual one. Compositionally it conveys power through their sheer size. The magnification of the wired net on the surface of the canvas creates a feeling of isolation reinforced by a human figure longingly looking over his shoulder; within the graveyard of his urban concrete jungle. The wired net therefore becomes the main protagonist, manipulated by the artist to create vistas of emotions that is carried through to the viewer making him feel shackled and imprisoned. These dimensions of human psyche are the result of social bondages that disallows an individual to be free or it remains a paradox of shackled freedom. Yet optimism is not far behind as the artist joyously indulges in representing a tree with white blossoms juxtaposed with abandoned urban constructions carrying within its heart the dualities of life and death, self and other, optimism and pessimism.
The engagement with circle as a shape marks Pradeep’s emotional consciousness, by developing as a leimotif that inhabits all his canvases, marking its presence either as a sign similar to metro rail but sans the blue line across or is shadowed as a background in some. Symbolically reflecting the notion of eternity, the circle is articulated by Pradeep as a metaphor of vicious circle in life between suffering and joys that ever remain cyclical. The colours too speak eloquently with optimist blues, night blues or flaming orange and yellow ochres tamed by the earth browns.
Undeniably Pradeep’s visual language has the potency to make the viewer reflect philosophically on questions of existence and questions of freedom. |
