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No stony silence

’ Photo Vipin Chandran

Sound effects Artist VK Rajan with his work, Rhythm

The sculptures in stone capture your imagination. V. K. Rajan’s show titled ‘Resonance,’ now on at Durbar Hall Art Gallery, virtually makes you ‘listen’. Visually eye-catching there is an audible quality to them. They resonate as if with real sound, magical unseen vibrations, varied frequencies, low decibels. Well, they do raise the pitch of one’s thoughts. It is the fluidity, the movement in stone that speaks and you listenBut if there is sound, it is muted. There are no loud proclamations, no high volume. In quietness they speak, quietly but powerfully. That’s the minimalist quality about the sculptures.

The artist who teaches the subject, sculpture, at the Thrissur art school is no new entrant to the technique, style, medium and aesthetic thought process. He carries the subject with ease and grace. The stones, rough and rocky come under his manual chisel and hammer, mechanical pound and grate to smooth contours that resemble ‘aum’. There are only six works, each telling and strong in idiom.

Granite is a very powerful medium as seen in history. Carved, shaped, beaten, it is the perfect canvas of tales and thoughts of ideas and ideologies. Here the artist has sculpted out of granite the ‘swara’ and the ‘laya’ of the seven sounds, “the iconography of sound,” as he explains. The seven sounds interlocked as a chain pillar is a fantastic conceptualisation. The all encompassing mother of sounds, the cosmic, ‘aum’ is titled ‘resonance’.

Two other works are in this title, both more abstract than the alphabetic ‘aum’. “Stone is like liquid, very special” says Rajan and proves his claim in the almost effortless flow and feel of the sculptures. Rajan works out from his studio at Amballur, atop a hill. “The winds there make strange sounds,” he reasons about capturing those sounds in stone.

The two works titled ‘rhythm’ is open to several interpretations. Interlocked stone rings (made from a single stone) and stone cubicles, one polished and the other rough, atop one another give it a sexual overtone. “It is the ardhanareeshwar,” explains the artist, the coupling of the male and the female forms.

The colour red on the triangular opening in the coupled stone is, “quite obvious” as a viewer was overheard saying. “It’s disgusting, but the fact that it has agitated me is the success of the artist.”

Yes, the show will draw response for its high artistic quality, for its double entendre, intended or not and for the modern approach to timeless stone. The show is brought by Bombay Art Gallery and is on till June 30.

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