Master Of Colour Geometry

A ‘maker of the universe’ finds shelter in the global art capital’s exciting and eclectic atmosphere to give a new form and context to a magical mix of tradition, geometry and colour

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TRADITION AND MODERNITY: The artist

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.

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Perhaps these works served as a talisman for survival. Perhaps they were kernels of growth.

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What makes this exhibition important is that the works shown here are from a seminal period in viswanadhan’s artistic journey in the quest for a personal idiom.

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 Viswa were the two ‘progressives’ 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), Viswa 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.

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KERNEL CONCEPT: A sophisticated play of geometry and colour

As Jain writes in her lucidly engaging essay, Viswa’s generation of Indian painters was no longer ready to accept European artistic norms verbatim. Their was a quest for an indigenous modernism. As he tells Jain: “We realised that the American Pop Art at that 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 (literally makers of the universe), or craftsmen, Viswa 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 Viswa 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 Viswanadhan’s creative evolution. No wonder then, Anand wants to take this exhibition to other centres not only in India, but also to Paris and New York as well. Amen.

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