• 
• 
• 
• 

• 
• 
• 

Past Present: In search of the heroic

Mythology and history coalesce in Nandagopal’s sculptures. Far from the maddening crowd, Nandagopal works on his sculptures from his studio at Cholamandal Artists Village, Chennai. His solo show will be opening at the Galley Espace, New Delhi on 7th March 2008. Geeta Doctor captures the nuances of Nandagopal’s art in this catalogue essay.

S.Nandagopal, sculptor and artist, lives in a house by the sea on the outskirts of Chennai, the capital of the Southern State of Tamil Nadu.

On the way to Nandagopal’s house on the road to Mahabalipuram, the ancient port city of the Pallavas, the villagers are marking the annual return of the Sun to the Northern Hemisphere for the winter harvest festival of Pongal.

It’s a reminder of how rooted the people of the South still remain to the ancient cycle of the seasons. It’s a rejoicing of the primitive, a celebration of the cattle and the livestock, of the earth and the bounty of a granary filled with food. It manifests itself with performers carrying carefully balanced weights upon their shoulders, or the “Karagam” dancers who carry a series of decorated brass pots on their heads and make their way to the local temple with dancing steps and the beating of drums.

Balance. Control. Creative exuberance. These are some of the elements that have found an expression in Nandagopal’s work through almost the almost four decades of his journey through sculpture.

It puts into context a remark that Nandagopal makes when looking at his work:
 “You can’t forget 4000 years of history. I don’t think these labels are of interest to me anymore. It’s not a question of a choice between tradition and modernity, all these issues have their place in the individual choices that an artist might make, but for me these are things that I have absorbed and in some cases left behind. You have to be aware of the past, but also to move on. I might take my inspiration from Indian mythology. It is such a rich source of ideas, but I am not bound by it. Sometimes you need to find a point of reference. ”

That perhaps, more than anything else is the almost tangible force that lifts his work from the mundane and the everyday and places it in the world of the mythic and the magical. There is a constant search for the heroic. The titles of some of his works resound with echoes from the epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharatha. There are grand flights of imagination that take on the power of “Garuda” that is as much an anthropomorphic image of an abstract form that is both elemental in its minimalist outline of a soaring half-human half bird incarnation as it is of an idealized longing of an earth bound creature defying gravity and springing into an image of flight. Not far away from the area, on the hilltop at Thirukalikundram is the spot where the wings of the mythical Jatayu are said to have fallen.  Or they can take off from a specific episode such that of the rakshasa “Bakasura” the brother of Hidimba, who according to legend would devour a fresh human being every day. It’s a graphic manifestation of the limitless greed and hunger for power that is so vividly portrayed in our folk tales. When Bakasura is shown being vanquished by Bhima in a hand-to-hand combat the portrayal takes on an epic dimension, a colorful depiction of the same forces that threaten to destroy our own world today. At the same time, the muscular outlines of his warriors and heroes suggest a familiarity with the fisherman who sets out to sea every morning, his dark body cast in bronze against the gilded rays of the early morning sun, or the toddy tapper climbing up a palm tree to harvest the fresh sap.

 They may be read as a straightforward representation of a well-known story or as a part of the intensely layered narratives that lurk just below the surface of our day-to-day experience. Nothing is quite as simple as it first seems. The welded forms that appear so smooth and burnished at first glance from the front are as intricately engineered as a piece of machinery when viewed from the bank. Though his pieces have a highly gleaming surface with bronze and buffed brass portions that alternate in a complex series of complementary forms, each element is outlined in relief by the use of an outline of welded tubular wires, or are shadowed with dark patches that suggest the effects of the leather puppets in folk theatre. The latest works are massive in weight and size; they suggest a gravity defying sense of lightness. Even if he never actually explains his method of resolving the tension that he creates by setting himself these puzzles of form and shape, the myths that he discovers in his daily encounters with the people around him, one imagines that this is how the sculptor in him finds sustenance. It’s a search for an inner harmony, a stretching of the material possibilities of the metal so that it seems almost weightless, the gossamer shimmer of a dragonfly’s wings upon a blade of grass, or the patina of a beetle rolling its prey along the mound of earth just as heroically as the hero Bhima flinging his opponent, Bakasura into the dust.

“This is why I like to do the finishing myself, even if I have people to help me. There are some areas that I want to leave in dark patches. I might suddenly discover this mottled effect that looks like moss on a piece of stone.  I think that’s what gives each piece its own specific character.”

Even more riveting are the structures that one finds holding up his images. Of course, this may be entirely unintended. Nandagopal does not expect the viewer to go behind his massive frontal sculptures and study the armature that holds them up, no more than a human body can be appreciated only be contemplating the skeleton within. Yet, there is a certain fascination to study the means with which Nandagopal has engineered the different elements of his composition into a framework of integrated structures that allow him to create the illusion of soaring floating figures that operate in an element of their own. They take one back to the tensile forms of the palm trees, the bamboo thickets, the arching limbs of a Raintree as it spreads its branches across the garden, the forms taken from nature that have often inspired architects and artists to integrate these structures into their own habitats.

“People often ask us whether living at a place like Cholamandal has been a source of inspiration. They talk about the waves beating on the sands, the fishermen going out to the Sea and so on. I don’t like to indulge in such romantic notions; after all if you ask a fisherman about it, he will just say that for him the sea is the source of his livelihood. In the same way, I can say that just living in such a beautiful surrounding is something that I absorb into my life without being conscious about it. But, it is a privilege. I can work in complete isolation if I need to. I think I enjoy that kind of seclusion, but again I am never isolated in my mind. I always have the kind of interaction with other artists with whom I share a certain point of view when I need that kind of feed-back.”

The British artist Antony Caro has been a long time friend and one may even say mentor, even if the Caro’s work has always tended to be completely abstract and deliberately stark in its use of industrial materials. There is however a monumentality in Caro’s use of steel and sheet metal that is as heroic in its own way, particularly since Caro’s own instinct has been to refer back to a variety of sources, from Van Gogh’s painting of a chair, to the superb army of Terracotta figures that are part of a Chinese dynasty’s own definitive narrative. Their work could not be more different. At the same time, the very fact that a long-term dialogue has been possible suggests that somewhere they have tapped the same source of inspiration for their work.         

The house itself that is set in a garden full of trees and shrubs that have been grown by Nandagopal’s wife Kala guarded by a posse of cats that stalk the property leading to the large airy workshop-cum-studio owes its location to the founding spirit of the Cholamandal Artists’ Colony that was inspired by K.C. S. Paniker, Nandagopal’s father. Paniker’s paintings now fill the walls of the house. They show the fascinating evolution of Paniker’s brush with different techniques, starting with the certainties of the Bengal School and the excitement of discovering the then “new” world of European modernism that went alongside the struggle to create a new language that would represent the needs of a young nation seeking to make its entry into a brave new world. These experiments morph seamlessly into the later period, when Paniker seemed to find new ways of suggesting the boundless vistas of space, through color, form and his use of words and symbols taken from Indian ideas of aesthetics, language and geometry.

“To be honest, I really do not think about my Father’s example when I sculpt,” says Nandagopal. “ I wanted to learn physics when I started and perhaps this was an source of inspiration to me.” He does not agree that the notations that appear on the surface of his sculptural panels, the tubular welded bits of cross-hatching, the punched holes, the striations, the multiplicity of small triangles, eye-let holes, circles, spirals, arrows and so forth have any similarity to the equations and textual signs that his Father would include in his work. Rather, he explains, it is a result of his need to start with drawing to create the pieces of sculpture. They may start off as pure form. Indeed, from a distance, particularly in an earlier phase, when he used to label them as “Memories of a Hero-Stone”, or “Deity” or “Ritual Image” they did take the form of the massive stone menhirs, memorial tablets and the outline of the massive stone temple gopurams that have been part of the architectural legacy of Tamil Nadu. He still starts every composition by drawing the main outline flat on paper and translating them onto panels of cut out board and then gradually building up the entire structure in separate massed areas of the copper sheets that form part of the sculpture. Like the “Karagam” dancers these separate elements carry the weight of both his abstract outline form and the narrative with which he creates his elaborate constructions. He is no longer apologetic that he intensely worked surfaces of his sculptures may be described as “decorative” a criticism that has often been leveled at the work of the artists at Cholamandal.

“I think there is a resurgence of the decorative,” he asserts. “And why not? It’s very much a part of the South Indian tradition. When Janakiram added a band of notation around the wait of one of his images, would you call it mere decoration or part of his language as a sculptor?” Nandagopal never fails to acknowledge his early debt to sculptors such as P.V. Janakiram and Dhanraj Bhagat, as indeed the fascination that most of his generation had with the Western modernists such as Paul Klee and Brancusi. Now, however he admits that he rarely thinks about them. They belong to the past, forging his hand and eye with their ardor for line and mass, instructing him in the vocabulary that he has now made into his own, so that he is no longer apologetic about his need for all manner of flourishes, from small V-shaped flutes, arrow heads that sprout from the fringes of his main forms, as well as the mass of small tubular wires that cross-hatch portions of his work. Indeed it would be said that even in the allied arts of dance and music, the manner in which a dancer sets out the main outlines of a particular piece of music or dance and then embellishes it with the improvisations that he or she can bring to it are what constitute the ‘rasa’ or flavor of an artistic style.

The “rasa” that Nandagopal invokes at the moment is that of the heroic stature in a human being. He does it with a sureness of touch and a tenderness that is as uplifting as a piece of music, a morning raga, perhaps sung at the ocean’s edge.

(Courtesy Gallery Espace and Geeta Doctor)