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Opening a flood of memories A work by Santhana Krishnan

Artist K. R. Santhana Krishnan has been mesmerised with the motif of the door from 1997 when he was a third-year student of painting at the Kumbakonam College of Fine Arts and continues to be under its spell more than a decade later.

For the artist, the engagement with this motif has been conditioned by revisiting memories of his school and college days spent at Kumbakonam. He says, “As an undergraduate, I would pass the agraharam everyday on my way to college. There were many old houses and each had a unique door. I was overwhelmed when the light of the rising and setting sun reflected on the doors, bringing out their serene beauty enhanced further by the villaku madums (sacred place for lamps) with their oil stains, the manjal-kumkumam on the carved nilai or wooden frame and the tulsi plant with a mud lamp.”

Santhana Krishnan’s doors serve as a narrative for memories and recollections, revisiting them in his present series of works to re-establish a lost tradition and heritage. On his travels across India, he realised that within every state regionally; doors have their own artistic and cultural story to narrate. Gradually it also dawned on him that the tradition of making vernacular doors was losing its grip in an era of rapid globalisation and consumerism. Hence, he decided to create artistic expressions in which doors initiate a dialogue with the viewer and indirectly with the past. In doing so obliquely, Santhana Krishnan analyses the ins and outs of perception. This self conscious stance greatly increases the complexity of the relationship between creator, object and participant. The artist is no longer content simply to regard the object, he also watches himself as he regards the object, standing outside of it to become a raconteur. Thresholds, therefore, for Santhana Krishnan are sacred places which form a boundary between what is “here” and what is “there”, thus revealing intimate and emotional memories through his forms. His doors articulate a metaphor which is a bridge between symbol and his thoughts.

An endearing quality about his paintings and mixed media works lies in developing intimate details that otherwise escape notice; for instance, the crows, the slatted underside of the chajja within the courtyard, the lone milk pail, the heavy uncouth locks, the dishevelled pots, the hand pump, the old transistor, the alarm clock, the crows, or the lantern. The aesthetic appeal of his works lies in his engagement with realism. His colours sing of the vernacular, bordering almost on the pop. They are garish ochres, reds, van Dyck browns, blues, ash greys, purples and oranges. The vistas beyond the door have no human element, and the stillness of his compositions creates another narrative, namely of the insensitive man who in his greed to be identified as global creates uniformity thus dissolving the individual, the distinct and the significant. Hence the doors lose their unique character and are engulfed in the torrent of mass production and consumption.

Doors contour the identity of the artist. He says, “My passion for representing doors through the visual medium is to keep alive our heritage and tradition. Equally the intensity of my approach towards this theme demands that I be recognised as “Door Santhanam”.

The exhibition in on at Lalit Kala Akademi till tomorrow.

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