0 + 0 = 0 (my father's mathematics)

In the age of photography, and instant image making technologies, how does one chronicle the ‘self’ to report the passage of time, the loss of people or the retrieval of ‘new’ things? What could be the possible mechanisms of ‘recording’, that reflect upon the self, weathered, somewhat exhausted, and often melancholic amongst the travails of memories of past and present. And how does one show this passage of time itself, its effects and its consequence? Or is it the act of ‘accounting’ itself, the taking charge of the ‘self’, replete with these questions and discoveries? How does the ‘technique’, the immaterial ‘sleight of hand’ lend itself to recognize and frame this ‘self’? These questions, however trivial or impertinent they may sound, help us to address not just the broader category of ‘Painting’ today, but also to enter the works of Siji Krishnan. 

Adopting the Surface 

At an experiential state, Krishnan’s paintings are rich with the texture of the surface that she meticulously prepares with smooth over layering of fine rice paper on canvas. The paper lends an organic quality to the painting that is reminiscent of the brittle quality of dry leaves, and the tautness of stretched hide on a mrudangam. The surface lends a sensation of sound that seems to emanate unknowingly from dark empty rooms or from still water bodies. This surface is then layered with gentle tones of pale watercolors. Slowly, as the image assumes intensity, darker layers are added and sometimes scrubbed in, to create undulations on paper, almost like wrinkled skin. The surface arrests the dark interiority of incubatory spaces. This process of modeling with paint is so frail, that it blends and seals into one single surface of cloth paper, as a membrane reverberating with a lot that has been firmly secured in it. This near sculptural surface is juxtaposed with another flimsy layer, that of approximate projections. Recording sensations of body and its memory, painting, for Krishnan, is a simultaneous act of recovering experiences from the past and chronicling sensations in the present. She neatly blends the figural and the gestural on the paper, the surface resonating a thin film of inferences, like a very fragile projection of dreams under our eyes, while we sleep. She visualizes this interiority as an abstract space of reflection, concentration, transformations and discoveries. Perhaps it is the painter’s studio that becomes an insulated cocoon for undertaking mental voyages. And the painting, the painted surface becomes that device which helps in activating the zone. 

Memory, Reasoning and Painting 

‘Lullaby’ is a series of frames, with images of a father on a cot, playing with an infant daughter. These delicate images evoke the vulnerability of all image forms that exist in the deepest layers of our experiential memory. The act of painting becomes a process of drawing out (extracting) forms from a pool of fluid sensations. Many reminiscences, of lived moments of childhood, again and again, are projected physically on the rumbling surface. The act of drawing out becomes drawing and spilling these sensations on the surface of the work. The frames appear disjointed and displaced as from a reel of a cinematic sequence. The repetitive stances in the frames are not part of any single sequence in time, but are articulations of various mental accumulations over a sustained period of time. The painter is engaged with deep excavations from the mind, where repetition becomes a vocabulary for the language of excavation. Every attempt at framing the lived moment exhibits the insecurity and dissatisfaction of the painter, about arriving at those exacting emotional instances of the experience. The painted image becomes a residue of this gruesome mental exercise. 

Image and Perception 

Where ‘painting’, for Krishnan, is a cathartic process, its appearance for the viewer delves on the faded, obscure appearance of very old personal photographs that have been subjected to severe weathering. A photograph is a mute reminder of a time or moment when the photograph was taken, or when that moment was lived. The remainder of the image in such cases becomes a game of signs. To construe the image is to mentally resurrect the contents from the residual traces of the forms within our minds. We, as viewers of these works, search for similar forms hidden in our experiential memory. The quality of drawing only provides a mere fleeting sign instead of representing the photographic real. The forms, the people inhabiting these frames are types; their identities are generic, not singular. Thus, the signified person or thing at the most suggests and then leaves us. Its trace fuels and retrieves that which has been forgotten. 

Yet, for a viewer, who stands far from the field of enduring this mental exercise, the stills produce real moments, from a story of an absent time. The repetition of characters in each frame, as ‘stills’ similar in spirit but different in their gestures, becomes a part of larger series, whose beginning and end has little inference. The different positions and gestures of one single moment animate those retrieved moments and lend them an organic playful quality. Taking this drama a little further, are the metaphors that are cast within these images. 

Security as Metaphor 

The protagonist is a father with a bare chest, clad in a white Kerala mundu clothing his legs and lower torso. Translucent white paint becomes a fabric here, reminiscent of a grandmother’s lap draped in worn white muslin. The father, almost matronly, appears as a maternal figure, tenderly fondling, whisking and enclosing the small infant girl. If the masculine humorous attribute could blend with the feminine, melancholic one, the face of it would be an androgynous portrait of the father that confronts us in the Last Lullaby. 

The playful child appears sometimes quirky and naughty, sometimes calm and mutely asleep. The child is self-absorbed and a glow of contentment is visible on her face. Even where the painter has rendered the child ‘faceless’, the body and its gestures emanate serenity, involvement, and complete submission. At some places, she is made in the guise of a supple doll; pliable, yet demanding extreme flexibility from the father, almost like a young pixie! 

The characters are disguised behind gestural, flowing, informal mark making of drawing. These quiet portrayals reveal the dilemma inherent in the modern painter. The predicament is that of being torn between truth and masquerade, the inability of the artist to disassociate the facts of living from the fictions of making. 

Sitting, playing and lying on a cot, a transparent mosquito net floats over and around these two characters, becoming a protective membrane for them. The painter’s mind enlivens this inanimate mundane object into a painted metaphor of concealment. The net hangs in drapes and flourishes, looming abstractly over the figures. It is a spiders’ web, a disagreeable element in a domestic interior. The object is taken as an image to clasp by the abstraction of painting. The gentle lines of white-grey paint become slivers of silver over the richly painted dark blue-black background. The ‘web’, a cacophony of entangled threads (strokes), gently hover over the heads of the father daughter duo, cocooning them within a maternal garb. The tenuous tip of sable hair gently coaxes these veins of paint out on the surface, onto the figural attributes of the protagonists. Perhaps protection hinges on the point of suffocation- the painter’s mind pivots between beautiful reminiscences and stifling nostalgia. Transformations materialize within the enclosure of a studio space. 

From feeling to Conception of an Idea 

The present body of works reflects upon Krishnan’s reminiscences as an infant child, a soft, supple doll, a daughter, and the transformation from this infantile stage into an adolescent girl, and then a youthful young woman. This metamorphosis is distinctly shown through five iconic works titled ‘transparency’, each representing the under developed body, enmeshed within soft, buoyant natural object as a feather, a weaver bird nest, a flower, a seed pod and a dry leaf. These evanescent abodes encase the body like a cocoon of sorts, helping in the slow mutation. 

The meticulously painted soft encasement shows a flimsy enmeshed body, though with a gesture of extreme vitality and flexibility. A child like self, going through an embryonic transformation, the body is seen with an inherent tension and a latent dynamism. The intrinsic potential of the body to writhe and wriggle out in these works, is contrasted sharply in another portrayal, that of submission and immersion into the natural order. Shakespeare’s Ophelia is visited through Millais’ representation to weave grief and mourning of the lost father. The self oscillates between the realities of past and present, but paints, both these positions to understand the tenuous character of fate and its rejoinders through Painting. 

Self - Transformations 

Two large works gyrate out from these self-representations within the natural order. One is the re-presentation of an enormous cobweb on a rose creeper and another, a big, nonchalant pile of Hop bush (or Jacaranda) seeds. 

The metamorphosing feminine body that we witness in the last series flows out here into becoming nature itself. As ‘Still life’ holding a nexus of many lives within it, both these works seem like a ventriloquist act. The artist has causally projected the self onto the still life, framed from the sphere of the natural world. 

Precariously painted, fresh sparkling dewdrops dangle from the cobweb, reflecting a hundred thousand small human faces. Time freezes here in this frame of representation. We feel unclear if the painter is painting the self, reflected in the dewdrops or painting the self as a fragile cobweb, vigorously enmeshing a thorny creeper. The ‘still life’ is being witnessed by many strange, unknown, viewers of this frame, all being reflected in the small droplets. 

And then the same expression flows onto a pile of dry ‘100 seeds…’’, staring obliquely at the nonchalant viewer, with countless obscure, humorous faces. Brittle, light and yet carrying infinite potential, seeds become a refined metaphor to represent the reinforcement of the self as a protagonist. 

The depiction hinges on the (dis) order of the (natural) world, and its relation with repetition ad infinitum and a tenuous intrinsic order. Perhaps painting becomes an act of discovery of that potential. It comes close to alchemy, animating the seemingly dead through the arena of fantasy. Renewing faith in the mundane and the trivial, melancholy and humor conjoin here, together in a quixotic embrace. 

Rakhi Peswani 

Bangalore, 2012