Saturday, October 19, 2019

Kinetics- Sensation

Kinetics are back with a sensational show. Gallery Veda, that hosts the show, has an exceptional way of sprucing itself up for every new show. It feels like the gallery is reborn to host a new show. This time it was no different either and it is a pleasant feeling to encounter art in such a credible space. The etching of texts on the wall, the artist names printed on the glass doors make for a very fine sense of the space.

Just as you climb the stairs and reach a wall, mid way up, you encounter the title of the show stylistically portrayed on the wall and as you turn and reach the first flower level you encounter the curatorial text, both in English and Tamil ( the Tamil texts are such a joy to see), and then as you turn to enter the gallery the the glass doors offer you a room's view of the art works with the names of the artists stamped on the doors in bold letters. That's a fraction of an idea of the amount of aesthetic sense and ergonomics that goes into making of the experience of the show.


The show features works of eight artists, each of them pursuing a distinct style and practice and venturing in this show to experiment with new material and ideas while holding on to a certain string of continuum in the character of their practice. If there is one character that binds them all, it is a certain conscious moving away from a 'prettiness' and questioning the character of material involved. 

Gurunathan's works have a fuzzy, woollyness about them. He has put up a collage of ink smeared fabric, the shapes and roughness of the fabric, with lingering estampages of being rationed are pointers to certain memories and economics and politics. He has also put up a ceramic installation, with coins embedded in them. The coins, i gather are a memorablia od his recent visit to france.


Kumaresan Selvaraj's works combine wood, fibre and resin in a compression technique. His works evoke an acute sense of modernity in experimenting with material and form. One of his works we encounter early in the show reminds me of a 'tower of hides' evoking attendant feelings of political dimensions. The other works in the same technique convey different imagery, that are quite absorbing. These works are very engaging for the different imagery they evoke from the manifestation of striations in our daily visual realm from a floor mat to layers of the soil, etc


If Kumaresan's works captivate us with striations, Saravanan Parasuraman's works play around with the circular form. His bigger work with an arrangement of smaller circular discs radiating out of a central core to form a million petalled flower like arrangement is a very engaging work. he chosen unromantic colours like ash, grey, brown, blue and white to create a dynamism and add energy to the work. 


His other work with mounted wooden stubs with a hollow core painted red in the centre and black in the inner surface. The hollow in the stub is edged out along the patterns of cambrian circles in the wood an allusion probably to the wound of years of life lost to tougher times.

Yuvaraj Arul's works are the only ones in the show that have a semblance of 'prettiness' about them. His installations in metal sculpture evoke a fantasy world imagery. A beautiful face amidst flowers, a face with key holes on it and surrounded by keys are the stuff of this fantasy world.


Yuvan Bothisathuvar's works play around with linear element and how it interacts in creating illusion of surface. The rusted piece of corrugated metal sheet looks like a perfect find that fits in so well with his practice of creating illusions on surface. 


Sunil's works play around with the texture of metal and wood. He has created illusions on the texture of the material creating what looks like a soft toy image of Garuda from wood and an amoebic piece of fabric from metal sheets. His video installation is a meditation on shapes forging out of a process of destruction.

Aneesh's video installation was the show stealer for me. The blurred images of street scenes of a river side locality captured with all its bustle, culture and social activity, brings to life in all its mood and aura, a certain fragment of our bioethnocultural sphere. The photos the accompany the show add value to the video. 

The overlapping of frames and the tardiness of the motion combine to produce different visual effects. The sparkling life in the image of a bird captured randomly in the blurry frame of the the sky are remniscent of the ripples set off by a stone on a serene pond. The haziness and the slowness  of the video adds to its magical appeal. 

The show Sensation is a package that offers one a taste of modern and incrementally experimental art. Kinetics is a group to look up to and the sense of completion they make as individuals and as a group, and manage to keep repeating it, is amazing. Congratulations to the team and the curator Ganesh.

No comments:

Post a Comment