by M D Muthukumaraswamy
Inside the tranquil Besant Nagar residence-cum-studio of K Muralidharan, his new modernist painting of the Vaishnavite poetess Andal startles you with its alluring imagery as a piece of folk art. On a closer look at the familiar features of Andal -the side hair bun, the parrot and the flower garland -you become aware of the rich texture of the painting. The armored body of Andal in geometrical shapes of black and white makes her figure stand out against the lyricism of the “Tiruppavai”, written as if the canvas were a stone of inscriptions. The helplessness of her slender hands matches the dreamy big eyes and the mysterious half-smile hidden behind her lips.
Masked in crimson, a large peacock, a miniature of a reclining Vishnu, Garuda, and numerous little creatures divine and natural share their colours with the flower in Andal’s hand. When you realize that behind the painting’s charm there lies a mastery of portraiture you begin to wonder whether the semblance of his works to folk arts is only a pretense. Muralidharan says in one of his exhibition brochures, “I wouldn’t call mine folk art, and it would be more appropriate to call it naive art”.
The goddess Meenakshi painting shares several of the stylistic features of Andal but it appears to be more fantastic with Meenakshi’s wild Medusa-like hair, and the hands making a magical appearance from the masked universe of the crimson background. Comparing the paintings of Andal and Meenakshi one would discern that what Muralidharan calls his naivete is actually an innocence with which he approaches his subjects, the popular images of religious folklore.
Muralidharan’s present sets of paintings are, in fact, a culmination of his long creative journey as a painter. In his very early works, immediately after his graduation from the College of Arts and Crafts in the late 1970s, one can see his tendencies towards creating involved portraits and surfaces with rich textures.
Muralidharan says that his shift in the choice of themes occurred in the mid-1980s when he was visiting Hampi. Sitting in the sprawling ruins of Hampi, Muralidharan decided that the conversation between conservation of tradition and chronicle of change would be integral to his paintings.He found the inventory of his fantasies in his immediate environment and neighbourhoods: the elephants of Thiruvallikeni temple, the qualities of the graphics of Tamil alpha bets, the idea that goddesses could be sittin g on lotuses while cows are wandering in the busy streets, and animals, birds, and humans coexisting on the same plane.
In Muralidharan’s paintings of the 1990s we see his impressionist portrayals of gods, goddesses, and elephants on flat surfaces that lend a surreal and dreamy quality to his paintings. As years pass by, Muralidharan grows more innocent in his approach and in his paintings at the turn of the millennium we see his works approximating popular imagination and providing us a chance to examine our traditional images.Every decade seems to have added a layer of meaning and elegance to Muralidharan’s paintings and his accumulated learning is evident in his new paintings.
The artistic achievement of Muralidharan’s present set of paintings is spectacular not only for himself but also for his methodological inheritance from the Madras school of art which set out to discover our cultural roots and their modern expressions. Muralidharan’s folkloric motifs, and the images of popular religious folklore such as goddess Lakshmi and Saraswati do not abandon the traditional decorative patterning but they reinvent them and reposition them.
Another characteristic of Muralidharan’s paintings is that he does a series of paintings on the same subject. Whether it is an elephant or a Kamadhenu, Muralidharan presents a set of variations on the same theme, accentuating the play on our unconscious perceptions of them. He says, “I also learnt that I must continue to evolve, continue to experiment, if I should be relevant and meaningful to the society I live in. To me artistic achievement, success and being different is not a fixed point from where you can talk down to people. It is a state of flux and I am part of it.” The good news is that K Muralidharan’s Andal is a masterpiece.
(The author is a folklorist, Tamil writer and director of National Folklore Support Centre)
source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Chennai / July 22nd, 2015