S.Kalidas' Archive

Viswanadhan: Geometry of Colour

 By S. Kalidas

In 1976 Paris based Indian painter V. Viswanadhan met with a near fatal accident on a German autobahn. The car he was driving was completely crushed and the artist himself spent many months recuperating from his wounds. The works he was driving with to show to a German gallerist survived but he says he never sold them  or even showed them in any exhibition for the last thirty odd years.  “Whenever I showed them informally to people they invariably offered to buy them off and I suspected there was something wrong somewhere,” jokes the Kerala born, Chennai-trained artist who made Paris his home way back in the late 1960s. Perhaps he kept them as a talisman of his survival; perhaps he wanted to hang on to these works as they served as kernels for growth as a whole lot of other paintings would emerge out of these over the following decades.  

Now Ashish Anand, director of the Delhi Art Gallery, has not only persuaded the veteran painter to show this hidden opus, but has also brought out a handsome book of essays on his life and work. The exhibition titled Viswanadhan: early years comprises small, jewel-like mixed media works on paper and will be on view from April 26 till June 30 at the gallery in the ethnic-chic Hauz Khas Village.

Edited by art critic Roobina Karode and with contributions by the senior Keralite artist  A. Ramachandran, Karode, Madhu Jain, Jean Marie Baron, Philip Golub and the artist himself, the hard cover publication Viswanadhan throws light on the artist’s s life and work with just the right mix of text, photographs  and reproductions of works. Jain, who has been a close friend of the painter for decades, traces his life—from his difficult birth in a small village in lush and emerald Kerala in 1940 to his years of struggle and training under the famous teacher and artist K.C.S. Paniker who headed the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Madras, and then on to his early years in Paris the birth place of modernism and surrealism, the two art movements that changed the way the world looked at art and artists for all times. 

There were other Indian artists who had reached Paris long before Viswa, as he is called fondly, wandered into it practically penniless. Paritosh Sen, another alumnus of the Madras Arts College had been there as early as the late 1930s and so had the passionate Punjabi-Hungarian Amrita Shergil. Just preceding Vsiwa were the two ‘Progrssives’ from Mumbai S.H. Raza and Akbar Padamsee. There was also  the writer-painter Ramkumar from Delhi and others. But there was a big difference. While all these painters had gone to Paris to study art under Parisian masters and strove hard to acquire what is called the French ‘sens plastique’ (visual sensibility), Viswanadhan arrived as a practising artist on his own terms. He not only brought his own sense of colour and imagery to the French capital, but also over the decades, got it accepted by mainstream French gallerists, critics  and collectors. 

As Jain writes in her engaging essay, Viswa’s generation of Indian painters was no longer ready to accept European artistic norms verbatim. Theirs was a quest for an indigenous modernism. As he tells Jain: “We realised that American Pop Art at the time was looking for something similar to what we were doing with our mandalas. Artists like Paniker in the south and J. Swaminathan in the north were already talking about it. They discovered that we could keep our native identity and also be modern.” Viswa’s success in the citadel of European modernism signalled not only the arrival of Indian art on its own terms but also heralded the  re-conversion of the Mumbai Progressives like Raza and Padamsee to Indian aesthetic and cultural moorings.

Hailing from a family of vsiwakarmas, or craftsmen, Viswanadhan sought inspiration in Tantric mandalas but did away with their religious symbolism. He delved into their plastic  form almost in purely painterly terms; what J. Swaminathan had called the “colour geometry of space” and Viswanadhan refers to as the “inner structure of things”. The result is an extremely sophisticated use of colour and basic geometric forms like the triangle, the circle and the square, informed by an ingrained sense of the Tantric tradition but not bound by it. Besides, as a scion of the viswakarma lineage, Viswa’s sense of geometric abstraction is not derived from  an acquired vocabulary and grammar, as such it needs no pseudo-religious props to make its mark.

What makes the present exhibition important is that the works being shown here are from a seminal period of Viswa’s creative evolution. No wonder then, Ashish Anand wants to take this exhibition to other centres not only in India, but also to Paris and New York as well. Amen..