I First met Madhavan Palanisamy and his works in a show that was a part of CPB 2016. The show was called 'in dreams.'. I remember the show for the shock i felt when i encountered the image of beloved writer Kovai Gnani in one of the pictures. i was shocked at the treatment of a father figure and his blindness. i went back to the artist's bio note to gather more information about the artist, and it was a surprise to discover that Maddy was the son of Kovai Gnani. i was also glad to have Maddy around and talk to him about the shock and get over it.
After i got talking to Maddy about the show, i started making sense of his other works, but the portrayal of the father figure was still unpalatable for me. After all these years, i got an opportunity to listen to Maddy again, and this time talking about the entire gamut of his photographic, personal and professional journey on a platform made possible by Thalam. This was a good opportunity for me to understand and appreciate Maddy's works in their entirety over a span of a couple of decades.
At this juncture, i should thank Thalam for providing an opportunity to listen to and have a glimpse of a lifetime's work of so many photographers. This has come as a boon during this lock down period to understand, appreciate and engage with so many different professional paractices, journeys and aspirations.
Maddy's upbringing as the youngest child in a doting home, where he was 12 years younger to his elder brother; His scholarly father's doting on him and taking him along to watch avantgarde European movies, and sowing in him a sense of freedom in his thinking and sensibilities all show in different aspects of Maddy's body of works. Maddy seems to savour a childish enquiry and treatment of the world around him. This is most evident in the occasional graphic story board that features in his works.
These graphic illustrations are at once playful and profound in their minimalism. Maddy arrives at photography after dabbling with a career in Pharma and Management. He presented an overview of his works done under commission and of his personal experiments with photography. I have engaged mostly with the non commissioned body of work, though i have occasionally drawn from the commissioned work only to illustrate my view point. In my reading, there are two things that run common through Maddy's body of works - sensuality and playfulness.
Maddy creates an aura of sensuality in his images by playing with the lighting of the face. The sensuality in his images are deeply embedded and coded in the lighting and positioning. A woman's toe placed tenuously on a man's head was the hieght of sensuality in his images for me. But here Maddy plays around with the viewer's perception by not giving the viewer anything away to guess that it is a woman's foot, and further places the image in the middle of a deep cosmos like ambience and evokes the images of a primordial Shiva and Shakthi.
One also wonders if it is the light that Maddy fancies and fetishizes. This is more so evident in his work built around his visit to America. He is fascinated by the different quality of the light in that part of the world and produces and dreamy body of images, where building facades look like fabric and landscapes carry an European film montage like quality.
Maddy's playfulness is what is amply evident in most of his work. he does this by introducing Graffiti and toys into his work.
He introduces another layer of playfulness by knocking down the legs of science and the laws of ordinary perception and throwing an unhinged image at the viewer and inviting him to explore the dimensions that the viewer can bring to the work. In his images, mountains, and rivers are removed from their geographical sensibilities and reduced to a topography of crushed paper, folds on a bed spread and thick lines curving on a graphic sketch board. He would also invert scale by creating a perception of the cosmos from a close up of a conglomeration of speck of dust.
The series Simla special manifests another dimension of playfulness, wherein he invents new images that monumentalise and marry his own and his son's sensibilities.
He creates a collage of images and enjoys disrupting the viewers sense of balanced perception. He takes away the viewers crutches of conditioned vision and invites him to discover a new balance in his picture. He invites the viewer to join in on a new state of mindfulness.
Apart from sensuality and playing around, the influence of his writer father runs quite prominent in Maddy's body of work- the obsession with the written word, the type face of a printed word, the aspiration to poem making, the playfulness with which the father gives himself up in totality to his son's playful world - offer interesting paradigms to Maddy's work.
Maddy accords the animal subjects in his pictures a great sense of dignity of a kind that is rare to be ever encountered. i believe this again comes from a very tangential influence of the philosophy to which his father subscribes to.
Maddy's commissioned works form a small plantation tract in a corner of the dense forest of Maddy land . It is his inventiveness and disruptiveness that come across prominently in his commissioned works for Coffee day, CPB and CSK.
