Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
Lines are not boring
|
The chemistry of brown, white and black lines
|
BLACK AND WHITE Mart Rathinaraj uses stark shades
"Normal is boring". Says who? Check out the rural humanscapes of Mark Rathinaraj now showing at the Lakshana Art Gallery and you will be forced to disagree. Simplicity can be so much more rewarding and appealing.
Using just white and black, Mark etches out the multi-hued dimensions of rural life. Can you imagine village women going to fetch water in black and white? No? Mark does, and how.
The lines draw the drapes and folds, the ebb and flow of life while the moving chemistry is created by a unicolour background of brown. Anyone can relate to the brown as that is the colour of rural India except in the monsoon. There is no foreground.
Mark uses the typical rural imagery: street scenes, women transplanting paddy, men shovelling land, women with sickle carrying food and water, plus a host of rural images. The idyll is broken only by the period paintings of burra sahibs with their epaulets and swizzle sticks or the Ganeshas (after all you have to sell your paintings, no?). But this is not cribbing.
But what purpose does it serve? Step up close and you are forced to think. Instead of being a partaker of beauty or art, you are forced to become a participant. In this world where people don't have time to stand and stare, making them think is an achievement. And that too using just pen, ink and occasionally acrylics.
Mark hails from a village in Tamil Nadu near the temple town of Kumbakonam, where nearly 100 children died in their classrooms in 2004.
SERISH NANISETTI
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Hyderabad
|
