|
Liminal Spaces
He wants to be called as ‘Doors Santhanam’ and his paintings are infested with the imageries of doors; he is Santhana Krishnan, a Chennai based young artist. Dr.Ashrafi Bhagat visits his recent exhibition in Chennai and comes out with the following observations.
The gallery space at Lait Kala Akademi, Chennai was filled with almost hundred doors with doorframes in varying sizes, colours and picturesque views. The doors either painted on canvas with verisimilitude or consisted of actual frames with half closed door. And the other half painted as a view beyond of the interior of the house. The exhibition was unique as a solo show with hundred works. The artist K.R. Santhana Krishnan has been mesmerized with the motif of the door from 1997 when he was a third year student of painting at the Kumbhakonam College of Fine Arts and continues to be under it spell a decade later.
For the artist the engagement with this motif has been compulsively conditioned by revisiting memories of his younger school and college days spent at Kumbhakonam. Says the artist, “As a young under graduate, studying at Kumbhakonam, I would pass agraharam or the dwellings of Brahmins every day on my way to college. There were many old houses and each had a unique door. I was excited when the rising light and soft rays of the setting sun reflected on the doors which brought out their serene beauty enhanced further with the Villaku madums (sacred place for lamps) with oil stains, the manjal, or the tumeric paste with red kumkumam markings on the carvings in the Nilai or the wooden frame and the Tulasi plant with a mud lamp.”
Santhana Krishnan doors serve as a narrative for memories and recollections, revisiting it in his present series of works to reestablish a lost tradition and heritage. On his travels across India, he realized that within every state regionally; doors have their own artistic and cultural story to narrate. Gradually it also dawned on him that the tradition of making vernacular doors was losing its grip within the fast developing consumer market; and decided to create artistic expressions in which the doors will create a dialogue with the viewer and hence indirectly with the past. In doing so obliquely, Santhana Krishnan is also analyzing the ins and outs of perception. This self conscious stance greatly increases the complexity of the relationship between creator, object and participant. The artist is no longer content simply to regard the object, he also watches himself as he regards the object, standing outside of it to become a raconteur. Thresholds therefore for Santhana Krishnan are sacred places which form a boundary between what is "here" and what is "there", thus revealing intimate and emotional memories through his forms. His doors therefore articulate a metaphor for tradition, memories and nostalgia.
An endearing quality about his paintings and mixed media works lie in his love for rendering interesting details that otherwise escape notice; for instance, crows, slatted underside of the chajja within the courtyard, lone milk pail, heavy uncouth locks, disheveled pots, hand pump, old transistor, heavy uncouth alarm clock, a contemplative cock or the lantern. The aesthetic appeal of his works lies in his engagement with a realistic style. The painstaking process of rendering every form and its associative texture is truly admirable. His colours also sing of the vernacular bordering almost on the pop. The colours are garish with bright turmeric yellows, ochres, deep blood reds, muddy van dyck browns, singing blues, ash greys, royal purples and sun set oranges. The vistas beyond the door have no human element, and the stillness of his composition creates another narrative, namely of the insensitive man who in his greed to be identified as global will create uniformity thus dissolving the individual, the distinct and the significant. Hence the doors have lost their unique character engulfed in the torrent of mass production and consumption.
The doors of Santhana Krishnan, are his experience of those images created out of prayer of keeping the memory alive and will continue to speak to the creator long after the initial process, as images and body sensations.
Doors, therefore has vehemently contoured the identity of the artist. Says the artist, “My passion for representing doors through the visual medium is to keep alive our heritage and tradition. Equally my intensity of my approach towards this theme demands that I be recognized as “Door Santhanam”.
|
