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His ongoing solo exhibition ‘The Unfilled Spaces’ at Kashi Art Cafe on till January 25 will tell you subtly, very artistically, very classily his relationship with the forest.

Relationships both human and in animals is the underlying, bigger metaphor in the works. And how does one draw the intangible, the pull and push, the wear and tear of something so fragile, so complex, so challenging as relationships. But Santhan has attempted to do that and done it well. Even the inanimate bicycles (two works) disintegrate over a period of time, like everything else, most of all relationships. But before the disintegration there are the unfilled spaces, the vacuum that begins to form. Santhan draws the vacuum too, the spaces where nothing is said, where communication has failed or is failing.

In a beautiful, big work on the sambar deer, there are broad, white spaces. “That’s the water, I forgot to draw,” he says humorously and water too, the Periyar, the ponds and swamps are all close to him.

Nature is Santhan’s refuge, his closest confidant, closest to his being, it seems. A work with a fish, swathed in bubbles, is the underwater scape so familiar to the artist. “Most people keep their eyes closed underwater but I know the insides well. It’s magical,” for Santhan. And so he’s caught the mystery and the flow, the air bubbles and the gurgle of the deep. “There is fear too when you are underwater and there is fear when you sink in memory,” says Santhan ruminating over life in general. Are the unfilled spaces the unexplained fears that Santhan talks about, one wonders.

The primate monkey is the subject in four works. There to the tug of relationships is evident, the chained animals, the dead bones and the monkey within the man. It is the missing link in the evolutionary process.

There are layers of thoughts that the artist works on and his technique is fascinating. A laborious, slow process of circles, squares, shadings, spaces, motifs that bring the jungle, the watery deep and also the recesses of the mind to the fore.

A pattern from which emerge the subjects. “I work very slowly,” informs Santhan and it is evident. The background and at times the foreground too is worked over meticulously, a discipline that must have taken him months.

Delving deep A relentless preoccupation with nature and man is evident in the works of Santhan N. V.

“I learnt patience from my work in sculptures,” says Santhan and whose Drongo (his sculpture done for the department of forests and wildlife) in Kumily is well known. Santhan presently has a studio in Kumily.

All his works (10) at the show are pencil drawings on paper, the very basic tools in art. Hence the colours are limited to grey, black and white. The only other colour is shades of tea wash, a contemporary, natural medium well used.

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