The Hindu : New Delhi News : A fusion of painting and photography

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Tuesday, Feb 12, 2008
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New Delhi

A fusion of painting and photography

Bindu Shajan Perappadan

Travancore Gallery hosts ‘Di stance’

Artistic reflections: Ink on paper by Binu Bhaskar.

NEW DELHI: For lovers of ink-on-paper work, the place to head for is the Travancore Art Gallery here where an exhibition titled “Di stance” is on view till this month-end. On display are 57 unique ink-on-paper works by artist Binu Bhaskar which have been presented by Bodhi Art.

Absence of human form

“The exhibition has brought together works that I have done over a while and took over a year to put up. This is a one-print exhibition as I would like to challenge myself and come up with yet another body of work. Through the exhibition the audience will notice an absence of human form and this was a conscious decision,” says the artist.

The artist has held several solo and select group shows in India and abroad. Among his solo exhibitions were “Prints and Posters” in Dubai (2001), “Diksha” in Melbourne (2000) and Victoria (1999) and “Sculpting Science” in Baroda (1997).

Binu’s versatile vision has led him to explore the fused effects of photography and painting to encounter a third element, thus discovering a reproductive quality/possibility of the photographic medium. This is visible in his portraits and images of crowds.

Collection

His current display comprises select images from several bodies of work that have grown over a span of 11 years; bodies he has variously titled including “Sap Consciousness”, “Unwanted Spaces”, “Absence”, “Distance”, “Skin” and “Sarah’s Room”. All these images share the marked absence of the human form; its presence, however, can almost always be felt -- lurking, muted, and covert.

In “Sap-consciousness”, which comprises the major body in this collection, the artist explores the panoramic stillness of vast landscapes and an immaculately clean imagination of agricultural land embedded in sublime features like deep silences and wilderness. Visually these images achieve an abstraction reminiscent of Australian Aboriginal art in their geometrically, linear patterning and colour, perhaps explained by the fact of the artist’s12-year-long stay and work in Melbourne.

Play with white

The series titled “Unwanted Spaces” dwells on the after-life of habitation and abandonment by contemplating the details of buildings slipping into disuse and ruin.

Also enjoy the contrast offered by “Sarah’s Room” and “Absence of White Lies” where the white light is experimented with. For the artist, white is a colour that signifies the composite of all, a celebration, a knowledge of all that is known and yet to be discovered.

In apparent contrast emerge his “Sarah’s Room” works, where the minimal, almost sublime imagery of his whites is replaced by the chaotic, the complicated and the warmth of red, blue and yellow.

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