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The Maximum Minimalist

In the catalogue essay for Prabhavathi Meppayil’s recent solo show at the Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, art critic Marta Jakimowicz explains how the artist blends traditional talents and contemporary thoughts in minimal forms that thrive with the energy of art and art history.

When approached from a distance normally comfortable for their sizes, Prabhavathi’s paintings do not quite reveal themselves. Whether small or larger, the whiteness of the surface first offers a sense of expanding space with a mere suggestion of forms and colours. It may be fragmentary trails of a sparkling linear meander or a mist of translucent hues. Its gentle beauty as well as its incompleteness generates fascination with a tinge of disturbing uncertainty. The immateriality of the intuited form possesses a subtle sensuousness which draws the viewer closer. Only then one begins to recognise faint, interrupted contours of figures, body parts, little objects and creatures that half-emerge from within the ‘colourless’ surface, from tinted hazes and from underneath creeper arabesques. Otherwise, one can notice just a few tiny shapes remote from one another against an enigmatic, milky vastness, whereas much closer viewing yields trajectories of the mesh that surrounds and connects them. The spectator becomes allured and compelled to touch the panels with one’s breath intuiting-watching-feeling-reading the images in somewhat separate episodes of a sequence that is partly given to chance but partly guided by the painting’s structure, and that eventually add to the aura of an animated, interacting whole. It appears to be fluid and suspended between relatively clear and regular shapes, rhythms or links and ambiguous, unfinished ones that shift, move away, blur and vanish. After a while one can realise that this is how life comes to us, as familiar sights singled out from among less distinct surroundings, personal experiences of the nearby and thoughts about other places or times and different realities, about people and sceneries loved now and those whose memory is waning. We weave shreds of the immediate, the faraway and the almost forgotten into a tapestry of attempted bonding.

So Prabhavathi threads her intuitions about things pure, subtle, warm and precious into a vision of the living cycle that emotively and corporeally connects her with others, with nature and with constructed spaces, the cycle whose birthing, growing and sustaining forces arise from, contain and return to the condition, or rather process, of dying. She looks at the world with such tender attuning and enchanted intimacy that it brings pain in the face of sadness and decay, of striving for pleasurable grace with dignity in a world of love and innocence as well as of suffering, unfulfilled desire and loneliness. In a very feminine manner, she empathises, veritably identifies with what is around her and in her reminiscence, but filtering only its crucial manifestations. Her weightless women seem to open up, submit to and immerse themselves in atmosphere and surface, become nearly obscured by throbbing nets and vegetal motifs. They calmly await, yearn for and absorb other entities, draw them from afar, even if aware of how fleeting this may be. Throughout there recur situations, poses, gestures and body parts associated with touching, seeing and hearing, of reaching for and gathering to oneself. To retain the subtle essence of such states, Prabhavathi omits the descriptive for the sake of a minimalist aesthetic, one nonetheless that echoes of manifold profundities and links. The sensitivity of her unassuming, involved and spontaneous directness allows her to discover finesse and complexity that are dormant in reality and in artistic form. Hence, in her imagery, in the lyrical feelings that permeate it and in her formal language, there is a constant oscillation between lucidity and mystery, closeness and distance, detail and the entirety, between tactile qualities and invisibility, presence and absence or loss.

The artist wishes to embrace all fine phenomena from times immemorial to the here and now. Like the people in her environs who go about their practical preoccupations and domesticity unselfconsciously carrying a tradition of myths, rituals and customs, of crafts, icons and adornments, she is a contemporary painter whose sensibilities have been moulded by and dialogue with the culture of the past that still informs this country as well as comes from a broader art history. In a natural way, Prabhavathi accommodates and transposes, merges traces of it all. Human emotions reverberate in plant-life, animals and earth, in glimpses of divine statuary and in story-telling. Whilst some of her paintings were triggered by events that had actually happened or allude to scriptural and literary heritage, there are no narratives in them. Rather, they evoke a possibility and atmosphere of tales, indicated by restrained gestures and stances and by a potential interconnecting of individual images on the picture plane.

Her animals and birds are portrayed with a delicate realism whose sketchiness imbues their animation with a signage of the essential rather than the specific. When she invokes deities, her lines imbibe a little of the classic Indian canon’s stylisation but also a little of live, contemporary vibrancy. In the female figures these proportions are balanced so intrinsically that one cannot see one without the other. The miniature-recalling linear contour of precision and intimate tenderness, of purity and lyrical is brush drawn by strokes thinner, more translucent yet and delicate until they register the calm repose of a breathing body and the raw tension of withheld, subdued nerves. This mediating underlies as much the faces which are taken frontally, in profile and three quarters, while a tinge of softening, irregular undulation or harder accents along with some abstracting and opening up of the unfinished and the understated assure that we can recognise ourselves here. The figures wear long robes which blend with the bodies over the chaste nudity of their feelings and enhance their gentle sensuality.

The artist uses indigenous casein tempera with vegetal and mineral pigments whose qualities equal their names, be it earthy ochre, iron rust, Indian ink, Egyptian blue or the lapis lazuli of the sky and the malachite that marries water to verdure. The ephemeral attenuation and translucency of the strokes, yet, lends a contemporary sensation. The single colour outline may come to the edge of visibility and stop while suggesting hesitance of shapes and tonalities and latency of other hues. Otherwise, approximating a tenuous silhouette the painter splinters it into a number of tentatively responding trails of nuanced grey, red, blue or purple and reconnects them. Occasionally a veil of wax affords a corporeal note to wider areas of carefully but ethereally hatched colour.

Prabhavathi works on wooden panels treated with lime gesso. Under her hands, the ancient technique characteristic to both Indian and early Renaissance masters bears the memory of murals in temples, mansions or churches and of paintings for private worship, enjoyment or commemoration. The patiently applied surface, smooth and even, nonetheless imprinted by the touch of the hand, evokes the sensation of walls and of human skin. The simultaneously muted and almost shiny texture offers a white abstract space that viewed in great proximity appears to extend infinitely and involve air as well as provide a sensuous physicality of immersion as background. Images are laid on the flat, but the comparatively thick panels whose sides are also covered by gesso act quite in the manner of three-dimensional objects of their own while retaining their architectural link. Like with her natural pigments, the painter seems to be collaborating with the surface, letting it act of its will as well as transforming it towards her aims. Watching these pieces of wall on gallery walls and looking as though they were lightly stuck on those, the spectator may be experiencing them through his or her personal sensitivity formed by domestic interiors amid close walls through which one intuits the vast world.

If the gesso panels make one think of old mythological paintings from southern India, this is solicited as much by the fact that the artist uses one of its most abundant and lavish motifs – the wishing creeper scrolls of gold leaf. The archaic symbol and embodiment of nature’s fecundity, energy and growth encompassing human life becomes accepted here and translated onto the hidden pathways of connections, shifts and splits, of living carnally, emotionally and spiritually amid and away from people and the surroundings of vegetation, sunshine-filled atmosphere and nocturnal radiance, of enduring, changing and dying to be reborn as the matter of new life. There is nothing illustrational in these minimalist traces of things subtle, and yet their impact sensitises the viewer towards real life. More than from ancient art, Prabhavathi has sourced the golden meander from the craft of jewellery and from relishing feminine adornment. Since childhood she has observed her father and tried to help him in the making of traditional bangles, necklaces and earrings. Fascinated by the laborious but bewitching course during which a lump of gold slowly turns into a sparking, intricate ornament, she has appropriated as well as re-interpreted its tools, techniques, material and motifs, even its compositional elements. The discipline of the hereditary practice imposes itself on and bonds with, strengthens the contemporary minimalist method. It also yields delight and fantasy, as the magic of jewellery-making seeps into the pleasure wearing it. For long, patient hours, with a little hammer Prabhavathi taps her slender gold point tool as though a pencil to etch the gesso with dots that flow as rhythmic, interrupted lines. She fills the hollows with the thinnest of tremulous gold leaf to conjure the effect of pigment and shallow, metallic relief. The artist may leave such imprints uncovered which then, if deeper, acquire properties of graphite or remain white but marked by self-cast shadow to simultaneously turn almost radiant in light when it heightens them at certain angles. In her networks of scroll and somewhat more geometric nets of linkage she frequently alternates abbreviated flights of golden spots and plain ones. Illumination altering with the movement of the spectator helps the eye to follow the fluid passages between continuity and disconnection, linearity and colour, flatness and a hint of plasticity or concavity, between whiteness, radiance and shade. Sometimes, the artist veritably draws or paints with gold leaf gathering it onto the jeweller’s tool and coaxing it to become a contour. From the paradigm of craft which in good fingers, anyway, can imbue rigid design with animation, the painter distils auras of living. In her yearning to connect she finds that the scroll of indigenous creeds is part of a universal spirit. She relates it to the Islamic arabesque and the architecture of domes and pointed arches along with their undercurrent of calligraphy. This, in turn, becomes absorbed into the basis of her own aesthetic, as her brush dipped in gold paint draws light nets of patterns-structures-links-moods and flowing curves of tendrils and buds among emotions, surface, space and an atmosphere around natural enchantments, spiritual unfolding and magical tales.

The earliest of the current works with a couple of veiled women in mourning pays homage to Giotto, the worn out fresco-like pigment that embeds the figures epitomising the preciousness of fading yet preserved memory. It could be addressing any place in this world, as the mural area finds itself between outlined hands reaching to each other and a larger female silhouette as though recalling a distant sight or concern, the faint multiplication of her arms suggesting the journey of her compassion. In all the panels, evidently in the many small ones but under the multitudes of images in the large paintings too, this woman continues as the centre – compositionally and expressively. She is the focus of sensation, the person who, attuned within, is experiencing life around her and far away through her own emotions, accumulating it inside and fusing with herself. She must be the artist as well as the persons she identifies with. She is looking at life manifest the trajectories of its condition, energies, emotions and atmosphere. We may see her as a lady peacefully sitting on a chair with her head raised to the moon, while a vibrant meander of gold and white dots scatters enchanted joy, and the blue neck above reminds about pain being inflicted elsewhere, pain that Shiva once held in his throat. Intoxicated with the magic of feeling things, the woman is then carrying the moon crescent on her head against a phantasmagorical tracery of colourless gold point radiance that spreads along stellar dynamics whose nearly abstract pattern has absorbed the soul of Islamic ornament. Whereas a multitude of such small designs viewed close on can reveal a vastness of space and poetic imagination, the larger, single shapes elsewhere will evoke an entire passage of existence - suspended diagonally and as though in a predestined direction that descends from a city map with streets and houses to a tomb shrouded by an embroidered fabric and fresh flowers. The woman in the middle lowering onto her knees is immersed in both gently feeling life and death. She next metamorphoses into landscape. Her figure enveloped in rough-light earthy browns– erect, expectant and accepting – gives into or becomes one with the matrix of generation and death. Buds spring from her sensuous, young body and from her fragile, bare bones, while further away, an undulating hill transforms into breasts and a human organ sprouts blossoms. There is always hope in sadness and trust in renewal. Another woman bending over, almost sinking, into the ground seems to be listening to and lovingly touching the substance of death. The fresco haze of soil hues – old and eroded, yet delicately translucent in its depth, stirs up calmly over hints of a golden scroll that emanate from a human neck which also belongs to a singing bird. Eventually, one can see her lying with her back in the ground, her ears detached as if delicate ornaments, the outline of her body straightening up and disappearing while vines of gold curl into the earth void. The vision of willing return to the origin becomes completed by the image of fertile love, as the union of a sleeping couple generates a host of golden creepers that are soaring up with fluid energy.

This transitory status between living and dying that embraces happiness and sorrow has an epitome in butterflies - weightless beings of freedom and fluttering beauty, vulnerable from the beginning of their short time between the air, plants and earth. The artist calls them her angels and paints them as a graceful woman with shimmering, transparent wings-arms-necklaces. Arabesques of golden vines grow from her limbs, their dynamic vivacity appearing to sprinkle pollen around. Soon the wings-hands stiffen and close revealing strain and ache under bondage, as the painter scratches, pulls the shiny pigment until it can bring out roughness and rawness from within the tender sensuality of the skin through which naked ribs are already showing. The hands may be strong and able to create dizzy, liberating poetry, but they have to fight against the restrictions and traps reality set up like coils of barbed wire. The hybrid creatures are still flying, at least floating, but they already falling upside down, their soft, limp wings open wide, the coarser now, dissolving spots of gold as though sinking into the substance of thin air. Standing among them one seems to be simultaneously facing these silhouettes of slow motion, watching them from above and from below.

Whilst her single figure exudes its bonding with the rest of life, of late the artist has been tuning to the paths of such bonds, their elusive structure and moods. The panels have become much larger with a profusion of little scenes and shapes or fragmentary images, that are partially hidden under prominent now nets still connected by them. Acknowledging her inspiration from the next-door mundane, Prabhavathi pays regards to the gold-smith quietly chiselling jewellery in his workshop. With the same delicate realism she depicts small-time vendors and busy manual workers. The dotted gold leaf meanders around them possess some of the splendid metallic vibrancy of carved bangles. The mesh turns more geometric and abstracted over indentations in white to evoke movement in life, amid people, birds, flowers and trees, also amid images and symbols of the sacred that are dear to the devout and the kind-hearted. Her protagonist seated at the centre, the space is strewn with motifs of walking and of hybrid states and identities that nonetheless unite. Human legs may accommodate dainty avian bones or a person’s hard spinal cord. An ordinary bovine faces a sculpted Nandi bull and a tree trunk lends its withering foliage to the earth. Fantasy and warm humour pervade the nocturnal city scenery with poetry that is rooted in the real, as gold point dots fan out like stars around sleeping figures, lovers and a reclining Buddha, an owl, barking and flying dogs, blossoms and disembodied feet on an empty staircase.

It is oneiric states akin to the sleep of death that blend and reconcile scraps of reality, memory and imagination. From the mouth of Prabhavathi’s woman emerges a lone jasmine creeper to branch out into a web of budding vines that circumscribe and gather a multitude of delicate shapes. Brushed by mild, flowing strokes of varied gold pigment, the tree of arabesques is like an ornament come alive and a tracing or embodiment of sublime linkages. It dominates stronger yet, when as a network of overlapping crescents it almost obscures the silhouette of a girl opening her lips to the moon and emphasises the lyricism of the mood. The design oscillating between firm clarity and pliant gentleness may verge on the abstract but gives insight into the structure and dynamics of sensation. From a distance, another large panel appears like a minimalist abstraction where spaced out, incomplete strokes alternating gold leaf dots and white graphic ones conjure a faint, mainly vertical rhythm among tentative but mutually responsive motifs. After some time one can realise that the lines mark fragments of bodily contours. They grasp the essence of feeling actual presences and auras remembered striving to hold together what is absent still somehow remains with us. The uncertainty and enigma of perception and recollection become translated onto the metaphoric image with a woman embroidering her memory like stellar patterns. As the figural traces around her are wavering and longing to approach a possibility of meeting and interlocking, their softened geometric trails recall the finely angular profile of a female face merging with the inner contours of a man’s chest in the paintings about the sleeping city.