“It is overdone, that school of painting (photographic style). Now what you have to do is to make it crazy, you have to change the subject matter, revolutionise the subject matter” – (Shibu Natesan, catalogue of ‘vision unlimited’, Grosvenor Gallery, London, May 2005)

With the suit of paintings in ‘Each One Teach one’ shown in Jack Shainman Gallery NewYork in May-June 2007, Shibu Natesan achieved a careful re-orientation in our modes of contemplating ‘subject matter’ in a painting. Iconic compositional devises of master painters of the bygone times and an everyday apotheosis in the life of ordinary human beings are at once fuelling his vision in these works. The inherited devices of narrative painting like ‘the homage’, the ‘adorations’ (as in ‘Jah Love’) and theatrical spaces (as in ‘Nirvikalpa Samadhi’) go well with some adverbial devices of ‘as if’ (as in ‘St. Jerome’ a figure taken from an image of a railway porter being placed on a pedestal to instil many ‘as if’ situations of threatened religious and cultural identities today) and propitiating devices of ‘settings’ (as estranged in ‘Captured Alive’ or ‘Investigation’) and ironic devices of ‘rhetoric’ (as in many works in the show ‘Existence of Instinct’.

Natesan achieves iconicity to human predicaments through well-thought out compositions and tangentially employed titles for them. With strange clarity he re-activates our lost narrative cues in the new context. There is a synchronisation of cultures of both mass media and legacy Art iconography. And this is a difficult but continuing act of conciliation from a painter in the age of ‘representational decay’. This essay is a probe into the details of this painter’s career that right in its beginning, like in the show ‘Missing’ (1997-98) originally initiated to relocate the spectres and spectators of ‘realism’.

In the Print Making studio of Faculty of Fine Arts, M S University Baroda of early 1990s, stunningly fresh and direct at work, Shibu Natesan was a much sought after art student. He was one among those art students from Kerala, bringing in altogether new tastes, a generic variant of German Expressionism, heroic human figuration and variously articulated interests in images of history, politics and myth. But unlike many fellow artists of his generation, Natesan without slipping into so-called early-career struggles, could keep nationality and other common identity baggage aside for good and straight away plunge into the real world of crazy human eyes and their dispositions. In the early surges of a considerable market-base for Art in India, He found natural ways into serious art collectors and Galleries and got a breakthrough artist’s residency in prestigious Rijksakademie, Amsterdam to top it all.

What made him much sought after artist? Is it his un-assuming compositions, ‘realism’ and figuration? Is it a ‘picture quality’ in its very basic level that could relate to trained or untrained eye of any viewer? Is it that strange regularity and skill so visible in his work? Or is it the amazing productivity of sorts he seemed to have demonstrated ever since he began as an art student? Since his works were in demand and out of the studio into the life of so many people with individual affinity to Art, he had to wait till 1995 to do the first solo show. That was with Sakshi gallery, Mumbai and it was an initiative taken by Geetha Mehra being dealer for his works.  ‘Professionalism came to me naturally’, Natesan says. (Shibu did his first solo show all by himself in the exhibition space at Trivandrum Fine Arts College in 1986. The show was titled ‘Drawings’-Editor)

Out there, in the tremors of ‘old world collapses’ (of Soviet Union or the Berlin wall) and ‘new world simulations’ (of war-regions, war-identities and free markets), the Art World in early 1990s had started demanding a new kind of cultural orientation from the young generation of many societies, including India, that was at that moment still suffering relative sense of inferiority in the Art world yet wanting to assert an enjoyable claim of international reputations and reach for itself. Many Indian artists responded to the changing scenario in terms of changed kind of objects and modalities of practice. By mid 1990s we find a lot of them practicing installation and performance art. But painting with its traditional hang as a pictorial language was a difficult bet for meeting the ‘international’ scene. Revaluating the potentials of painting, a few Indian artists emerged though. Among them Natesan acquired a rare political rigor in the matters of cross-cultural poetics of expression.

The new demand for a revaluation of cultural identity, though partly felt as an existential need of art-tribe, deflected our attention largely from the grim traumatic and polarised holds of nations, identities and ideologies of the old (cold-war) world.  It was no longer an insistence simply on Indian or ‘third world’ cultures alone, arguably facing crisis in self-assertion. The post World War scenario in 1960s had already sown the seeds of a particular ‘internationalism’ of late that could be made possible through a ‘battle for realism’ ¹.

In today’s context, be it the ‘modernist realism’ in Britain or ‘contemporary realism’ in America or ‘cynical realism’ in China or any such variants of distinctive realisms available, ‘realism’ in art has simply become a germinating lingo for a growing number of reality checks, political positions and identity revaluations.

It might be paradoxical as of now, in the growing surge of realisms in contemporary art, one can at once grasp and mistake a realist’s path of becoming. In a post-truth world, realism’s linguistic specificity only further dismantles viewers (rather than actualise the subject matter any further more) with its poetic possibilities opened by the contemporary artist’s variants of it.

Natesan has been making individual flights with a curious poetics of expression that has deep routes at various cultural locations and visual associations. Perhaps because of the very realism of one’s attitude, it generally insists on us to navigate through the actual locations, references and their commutations in an artist’s work and life. But task is not easy. The details of locations references and such stuff quickly turn out to be ‘mere footnotes’, as it happened in our conversation. Main text – the artist’s act - remains positively elusive in spite of any apparent ‘digressions’.

However, it can only be a basic understanding that Natesan’s sort of realism is clearly different from typical figurative ‘narratives’ one found in Indian Art. Also, he did not ever slip into the technical fallacy of ‘photo-realism’ though, interestingly after his rise into a shooting up Indian star in auctions, many were soon slipping into a kind of seductive ‘picture-making’ (collecting seductive ‘photo-realist pictures’ too) in India. (Photo-realism is qualified as a misnomer and is substituted by the phrase ‘mediatic realism by Nancy Adajania. It is said that a discussion between Baiju Parthan and Nancy Adajania triggered the production of this phrase mediatic realism. One of the articles written by Adajania locates Shibu Natesan as the initiator of mediatic realism in Indian contemporary art scene- Editor)

Natesan seems to have arrived at an interesting re-orienting of our devices of creating and conveying reality.  That could enable him to kindle ‘cross-cultural poetics’, I mean the richness and freedom of doing one’s extended mind with paint, in matters of identity. It seems to me that while doing a linguistic variant of ‘realism’, Natesan with his mind and life, saves himself and the viewer from all sorts of realist “doxa” (of representation, simulation etc.) in Art history.

So ‘Up Close Personal’ conversation this time was exciting from head to toe. It was a musical, political and painterly journey through a person who cuts across barriers of nation-states, violence, sensibilities, memories and identities, hence unsettled possibly by all means, but all the time throwing sprinkles of assorted political convictions.   

1

The introvert and energetic circles of young men learning Art

Shibu Natesan joined College of Fine Arts, Trivandrum in 1982. He opted for Painting, saying no to Applied Art favoured by his parents for its apparent job-generating potential. There was a circle of young art-aspirants of this region getting exposed to an ‘other’ world ‘out there somewhere’ in the country and the west, dealing with issues of life and its image making potentials in a strangely ‘liberating ways’ for them. The friends included Jyothi Basu, Jyothikumar, Gopikrishna, Alexander (Devassia) among others.

“We were all relating pretty much with the day’s literature and film. Most of us were looking at things in a Marxian level. On a practical level of art, we were all introverts. That provides a strange energy too. In India, probably Trivandrum College was the only school where German expressionism got lot of favour among students at that point of time. Later I found that in Baroda people were not very bothered of that bygone European movement. They were bothered of David Hockney or R.B. Kitaj. We on the other hand didn’t have any interest in them at that time.  Parallel to art, there was a cinema movement. We were avid film watchers.”

Whatever available as an atmosphere of art in that region was the indulging geometrical abstraction of the Madras school (artists). They were not really dealing with the social context in any significant means. The young art students in Trivandrum were actually trying to make people-oriented art. Being a regional art institution in India at that time, the college itself was passing through its bureaucratic dilemmas of being caught between traditional academicism and modern art trends, all conceived as derivatives of some dominant and mysterious ‘other’ terrains. So the student fraternity was not really ‘guided’ in any institutional way. Teachers didn’t have much power and there was no situation of teaching in that atmosphere. Natesan puts it in a positive way. Those young art students were all existential and energetic people almost naturally basing their pictorial essentials on the particular artistic ethos of the West with clear political content and a non-urban sensibility with which they could associate in some means. As Natesan vindicates, there was a strong attraction towards Die Bruck vein of Expressionism (The Bridge), visible in himself and friends’ works. Generally they loved Kirchner, Otto Muller and Kokoschka. They were finishing works in single human figure or a couple of figures, not more than that. They were not really doing thematic paintings. Most of them learnt it in Baroda.

Teachers could exert their power very well however, when it came into grading their students in their mark lists. They were not ‘first class’ students, perhaps because of their ‘radical’ nature. So when tried for admission in M S U,Baroda (after a short stint with Delhi College of Art in the meanwhile), the authorities there said that they could not give admission to Natesan though they liked his work. On the way back he went to Bharath Bhavan in Bhopal. He did some prints over there. J Swaminathan was all welcoming him. But he did not feel a prolonged interest there. “Seeing that river, you know I felt nostalgic, I thought O, God what am I doing here, I need to go back”.

In 1989, Natesan went to Baroda again. He did not take his original works. He took only some photographs. When they were applying there people were pretty much doubting ‘Malayalis’ for traces of rebellion. Painter (now acclaimed film maker-editor) K.M Madhusudhanan, sculptor K.P. Krishnakumar and some others reached there earlier, had once protested against an exhibition of Henri Moore works. They felt that a British schooling was wrongly and unnecessarily influencing them. Now one can possibly look at it as a parochial resistance. Though there was an informed premise for those who resisted it and possibly “the people in Baroda then didn’t understand this politics of those men” Natesan says. Needless to say that Natesan, yet another ‘Malayali’ was looked at with doubt. However, the influential teacher in painting department Gulam Muhammad Sheikh wanted to meet this young man again. He fixed another interview in the afternoon. But Natesan went to print-making studio just out of a sort of instinct. There met another influential teacher there, P D Dhumal, Head of the Dept. of Graphics. At first he simply boosted his confidence and discouraged him saying that they had nothing to offer him as he was already a quality artist who might better go to Bombay or Delhi. But finally Natesan got admission when Dhumal said ‘let us start working this afternoon’. Looking back, Natesan says, “Dhumal seemed very human”. But print making was perhaps a chance he got to do hundreds of works within the classroom, though he never intended on a print-maker’s life. However, in 1991 he finished the course, this time with first rank.

“At that time there was no so called ‘art buying’. No big money was flowing to Art. But people from Bangalore and Mumbai were coming. And you can always have prints again. I wasn’t actually good enough with the graphic technique. When I did lithograph, it involved lot of technique, timing etc. My teacher used to come and say ‘you don’t need to take the print, you might spoil it. I will take print for you.’ May be he basically liked my painting. In that institution also one was not ‘taught’ anything but there were teachers ‘just there’ and were definitely engaging and had some kind of faith in their students working in their own ways.

Natesan was engaged in the narrative school for the first time. In the young men’s group from Kerala those areas were not taken seriously. ‘Baroda’s contribution in my life is that it made me do works that induced narrative’s possibility’ Natesan underlines.

 

2

Futility of (epistemic) devices

Since the foundation of Sociology’s discipline, it emphasised the external nature of social institutions (the macro property of the society) and argued that they imposed themselves on individuals at the micro level. The ‘methodological individualists’ among them see macro-phenomena accounted for by the micro level properties and behaviour of individuals, by the situations dispositions and beliefs. In both ways there is an impending dialogue between holistic ideas and individualistic props. I am not going into the problematic of sociological methodology here. But I found it very interesting that there were some ignited ideals and icons being touched upon at random by this artist ever since he was available in limelight. The ‘everyday’ (rather ontological) reasons he so convincingly rendered really explained those ‘intuitive’ random choices of painted ‘subject matters’ which he converts into revolutionary ideals and idols.

“I was interested in history. Like Sher Shah’s constitutional amendments, reading Kalinga war. History is like a thriller. Myth is like an addiction. You get into it. Renaissance paintings are mostly mythology based. So I just got into it.”

He didn’t mean that textbook is a thriller. He was rather acknowledging the thrilling aspect of learning history in texts, books and images. It will further be an individualistic negotiation with the opacity of the discipline and hence futility of it as device to convey the textures of human experience. Though it is pretty amusing to give ear to his such explanations, I was sure it came not from the witty composure of an ‘unassuming’ artist. He rather assumes and asserts certain ways in which conditions sensitive to the epistemic devices (histories, images, photos, poems, stories, representations and simulations) of social / local environments and institutions (family, pedagogy, politics etc.) drives an individual’s creative choices.

The new found interest in narratives and figurative painting in some ways deflected him from the opaque anarchy of expressionism but engaged him more with the epistemic remnants underlying that language. He did theme based, social-issues works.’

Back in Trivandrum in 1992 he tried painting Vasco da Gama. Gama was already an expressive icon and an unexplained ‘historical material’ for those young expressionists. But Natesan gives some pretty detailing of why and how that icon came to be used. He got a book from ‘Shukrwari’ (that notorious but much sought after ‘Friday market’ of assorted stuff looking as if from all possible place on the earth) in Baroda speaking of Calicut’s (the place in Kerala where Gama and the Portuguese traders landed for the first time in India ) early history. The book says that in fifteenth century, Calicut had a different eco-system. There were strange fish. That seashore was quite different from as it is today. He made some paintings on an imaginary ecosystem. He took it to the faculty in Baroda. He had a slide show that was well received.

Natesan was a reader who loved stories. But not like a story reader. Poetry was easier for him because one gets images. He was sensitive to history and political events but not like an academician, not as an agent of any political discipline. A common man’s (let me not write a ‘humanist’) perspective was easier because one gets sympathetic for the victim case-sensitively. So he was sympathetic to Islam in the Babri Masjid issue because ‘it is always bad to take revenge’. Thus emerged his first solo show ‘Futility of Device’ held at twin centres, Sakshi Gallery and M S University Baroda. Later in life he took such case-sensitive political textures in works like ‘they say the sun shines for all’ and ‘Doubting Thomas’. He is pulling our senses to some textures of human predicament that buries violence love and revenge, the evidence of which are reflected and bombarded in the forms of photographic memory of images.  

He made use of photographs right in the first solo show. Then we reach at the sensitive and much talked about aspect of Shibu Natesan as a painter, the use of photograph in works. But I have always wondered what really was used by him in the painter’s scheme? Photos? Photographic situations? Photographic realism? ‘Photographic skill’? or these are more like ‘painted pictures’ looking like photographs’ ?

Painted pictures of the real world have assumed various roles in the history of ‘modernising man’. They served as souvenirs (keeping impressions of things fresh in minds) or eye’s delights (embellishing interiors of people’s homes) or political propaganda (used by people of power) or diagrams and illustrations (in pedagogic textbooks). In whichever of these said roles, there was always a replication of reality into a ‘referential other’ that might contest, enhance or even impose a discreet order upon the chaotic that is seen before. But what happens when one instil ‘other’ schemes from memory and the personal fancies – blanch, the pales and the crudity of all at once - upon those familiar photographic orders of reality reference? The ‘referential subject matter’ and its reality orders habituated by modernised man through his ‘culture industry’ is suddenly put to revert. 

As a result, one should see that too much of disciplinary fidelity is not really employed by Natesan when it came to the use of photography. His paintings are subtle but significant variations in the matters of a ‘photo- fact’. There are brewing connections with the way his individual predicament grew with a continuous emoting habit with photograph.
In other words, there were dispositional reasons for his interests in photographs with strong childhood routes.

 “I was a child prodigy affected by a curious world of photographs advertisements and bill board paintings with enamel. I did paint a lot of photographs in childhood. Have you heard of ‘fifty eight super snana (super bathing) soap’? Its advertisements enchanted me once. You must have seen advertisement sketches of ‘Neelibhrungaadi oil’. The old enamel painted bill boards painted by so many of our local painters. Those were typical Malayali version of pre-Raphaelite sensibility. I was an avid watcher of all those paintings. I painted them in my ways too. Also I did portraits of Sri Ramkrishna Paramhamsa, Vivekananda and all. One day during my stray walks I got a foreign postcard from Varkkala beach. It is a tourist area. That was a painting. Franz Hall’s painting. That amazed me. I pasted it on my wall. That time I was studying 9th std. At that teenage don’t we experience an intellectual nature coupled with some ambitions to grasp the ungraspable? I was not an eve teaser, it was unlike most of my friends. I even read ‘Keralapaanineeyam’ (the canonical pedagogic text for Malayalam grammar), textbook of my sister who was doing graduation in Malayalam literature.”

He was touching at assorted influences at random that are connected not simply in the rubic of his own individual dispositions and tastes. If so, it would have been nothing but idiosyncrasies. There are many things we the viewers can also can relate with, in an ‘illusory’ manner. He was talking all about visual associations (visual as scattered everywhere but enjoyable with a common ‘selective interest’), behaviours (pasting pictures of the ‘social’ space in to the ‘private’ walls) adolescent ambitions (to paint familiar pictures and emote with others) self reflexivity (the very tone in which Natesan was reminiscing involved a distancing from himself with a tool of mirror) etc. 

He was perhaps tracing the latent potential of popular and generic photographic languages as an open source code in paintings than as materials to copy or simulate or represent with technical finesse.

The residential tenure at Rijsksakademi in Amsterdam sensitised to so many such latent potentials of ‘image making’ as a programming of source-codes in individual encounters of cultures and institutions. Rijsksakademi is an institution of ‘High Art’, second just possibly to Royal Academy London. Piet Mondrian studied there. Many of today’s contemporary figures like Luc Tuymens and Merlene Dumas were there. Richard Deacon was an adviser during Natesan’s tenure there. Being one of the most up-to-date centres of Contemporary Art all new trends like performance and installation art were an attempt of everybody there.

“At first I found myself isolated as a painter in Rijskakademi. Mine was not a glamorous trade. Painter’s was an old act. It was totally different place.”

He took up some formats and references of Indian miniatures for their annual show and got Uriot prize, the prestigious award given by world’s best museum directors. And in the second year Natesan found himself a star. But somehow miniature stopped there as an influence at all.

3

The instinct of (epistemic) fragments and footnote’s subjectivity

‘Identities are shaped by history. Identity- experimentation and imagined possibilities are free floating and matter of choice for some, but they are also results of encounters with boundaries of exclusion for others.’ - Daniel Yon, ‘Elusive Culture’, 2000.

Epistemic devices that really churn his mind were recognised almost intuitively by Natesan by the time he came back to India. In spite of his general success and acceptability, ‘identity’ remained in him as a pertinent scheme of unsettled fragmented associations. Fragments were poised as selective concerns- like Kumaran Asan the poet, Missing people, Patrice Lumumba, Jamaican Music, existence of instinct – all were socio-political undercurrents for his paintings so as to make calm and poetic surfaces of travelling and grasping life with those currents.

It is interesting to take out one person / image from the plenty of similar ones, like from the group photograph of an uncle’s retirement photo or a photo-feature on social reformers. A family album or a photo-feature in a periodical magazine – one can’t definitely say where lies an image that haunts and alludes. One takes a tiny image from hundreds available. It is random. It is but a ‘selection’ indeed. There follows an inevitable footnote neither necessary nor fully unnecessary.

Thus occurs that painting ‘Poet Kumaranasan’ in the show ‘missing’ held at Sakshi Gallery in 1998. And out of an instinct I asked ‘why did you choose Asan’. That show included portrayals of so many ‘unknown’ or ‘unregistered’ people too. Suddenly he said all that stuff that are known to an average literate Malayali. ‘Asan was a revolutionary writer. He promoted ‘misravivaham’(inter-caste marriages) – He was an MLA of Travancore Legislative Assembly.’

By the end of this instinctual but almost textual description, he made a statement unlikely for any authorised explanations:

“I studied in Varkala Sivagiri school. There everyday standing in a queue I sang that poem (starting with ‘beautiful flowers and colourful butterflies.’). That was our prayer song”  

That is indeed an everyday memory of a school boy authentic enough to ‘feel’ a poet.
When equipments of modernity (heated activities in public domain) shifted into a lifestyle of everyday and habits of a social body, photographs and portraits were becoming huge carriers of individual dispositions on ‘ideals’ and their experiences. Re-doing the photographic situations (rather than re-producing photograph as such) is a reality check of the ‘ideals’ floated in the grandiose public domain.

Further, that occurred at a pressure for ‘identity’.

“When you are out of India, you become more Indian. Identity becomes strong. Such pressure comes up. West expects the Indian as an extra excessive in ideas. I had to trace India.”

It may be difficult to considerably associate a vernacular poet found at the cultural tip of the country, with the issue of identity of a whole country. For the western or even an Indian viewer, that could be a reference of just another man, may be ‘a poet of sorts’ as it is it said so in the title.

“Don’t you think he was a different looking man - dark and short? I felt myself in him, in that gaze in particular. I had no thematic interest. It was part of my development. Those who know will know the picture for its content. I painted some heroes every time. Van Gogh, Bob Marley or Patrice Lumumba. All of them come in the scheme of some sort of our socio-political understanding. You study them very well. You associate with them ... not picking up from somewhere.”

There is a possibility that experience is basically local and specifically evoking memories. That can not be conveyed in all due shape and detail to all. Yet, in Art, one can act at two different extremes of memory, as a socially (and temporally) created text on one end and individually conceived portrayal of personal ‘liking’ on the other end.

Then what exactly is that stuff called ‘socio-political understanding’? That struck as an ‘old world’ phrase for me. But searches for means to express that particular ‘understanding’ had shaped most part of man’s political (and identity) struggles in art and life. The ‘artistic disposition’ of ‘Malayali’ Art students also had clear reflections of it. They generally shared and expressed many political icons. Their associations with heroic images were not activated in a worship-mode. It was often a studious collection of images and texts that they shared and discussed among an assumed ‘intellectual’ circle. A major modernist novelist in Malayalam M Mukundan in his novel ‘Delhi’ (1969) typically characterises a young man leaving home for the urban spaces of Delhi to test his luck as an artist.

Son of a teacher-father, a political science student, active in Students Federation - a pro-Marxist student’s wing, boycotting disciplinary pedagogic habits, dismissed from college for violent actions, demonstrating against the brutal assassination of Patrice Lumumba, honoured for painting titled ‘animal’, Aravindan, the protagonist in the novel gets into the train to Delhi. Then the whole novel is set in the context of an antagonistic urban location that demands compromises in his ideals in return of a professional success.  (‘Delhi’,1969. Paraphrased from the beginning paragraph of the novel)

There are many things real, in between the fact and fiction, whatever as reflected in such a novel of art and artists who migrated or who encountered both the loss and gain of identities. Everything was not antagonistic. Everything was not simple protest and boycott. There are huge geographical and cultural distances one covers through a passionate sense for politics and history in an individual grasp. Natesan is a fully developed case study for it in Indian Art.

Natesan’s work titled as ‘Mourning in the heart’ is an early morning visual. A huge aeroplane is there. There is terror in the picture. He painted no Patrice Lumumba but his wife in the painting. One doesn’t need the footnotes on Patrice Lumumba or history of Congo, but the commotion of the picture is applicable to any context in which individual is looted of his cultural treasures and brutally murdered by tyrannies of various sorts and how it looks like life for his intimate people after the episode of violence.

Once touched upon that work, almost with a sublime rigour, in crisp language Natesan recounts major historical narratives about Patrice Lumumba. I knew that we were actually dealing with footnotes of our conversation².

“Lumumba was a daring individual who questioned the Belgian King with no compromise. They kept his teeth and hair in his memory. I still want to do more on him....”

One can call that a footnote’s subjectivity or a rigorous text’s elimination of extra details or a calculated projection of missing unauthorised sequences in history’s / memory’s texts.

 

4

Artist / mirror man / illusive being / seeing and showing

One wonders at the sort of ‘adolescent’ state of affairs that pass through this artist like a continuous shockwave. It ignites ideals in him still. For all his interests in Black political heroes or Jamaican music, Natesan consistently makes some very personal reality-associations:

“My father used to say that I look like Patrice Lumumba” (Patrice Lumumba the martyred Prime minister of the republic of Congo), “I admire him” (When speaking of Bob Marley),  “yea. We too have a history like this. We south Indians might have been saved for our geographical seclusion but lots of our central Indian people were trafficked and traded” (when speaking on the slave trades and colonial past and neo-colonial present of some African cultures) “It is much like a Kerala landscape” (On Jamaica the ‘paradise’ of music tourism).

Lot of elusive reasons lay behind Natesan’s interest in ‘Rastafarian’ musical protests or Patrice Lumumba or African political history as such. He delved deep into the materials of a small island, Jamaica, one tiny strip of connection between the two heavily polarised cultures of the world, Africa and North America.  It has much like the landscapes of his birth place Kerala. Both had colonial lives though in different ways. 

One may yet wonder at those kinds of improbable distances in time and space that could be covered through imaginative realities, the associations through which races histories and identities are negotiated amongst culturally and historically diverse situations. The distances are sometimes reduced by an act of cherishing. You may find a soothing rhythmic reggae in mp3 format readily available in your mobile.

Natesan had a rhythmic reggae that he so intuitively shared in the meanwhile of this ‘Up Close’ conversation just to take a break when it was actually slipping into the historical detailing of Jamaican music.

Acquired texts of cultures heroes and images are now mostly footnotes³. But definitely they are not unnecessary digressions.

Haile Selassie (the emperor of Ethiopia and god incarnate of ‘Rastafarianism’) is not my god. I don’t want to believe that. It is their issue. But that arises a very radical philosophy, like ‘we refuse to be what they want us to be.  we are what we are and that is the way it is going to be’. And you know, Selassie had visited and laid stones at various places in India, including Trivandrum and Kochi. Near College of Fine Arts in Trivandrum I remember curiously I used to look at those stones’

This is an experiment with history as an ‘open text’ for people, for himself, for you and me. We can criss-cross and engage in our own ways through our body, memory, seeing and showing amongst us.

When things at random are passionately associated with, though it is a real experience in its own merit, there is an imposed danger. One is doomed to the ‘loss’ of many things. Loss of identity, loss of political (in an institutional sense) rigor and an absolute confusion can creep in. That is not generally acceptable for any matured state of being, for institutions or any form of governance, for that matter. Only Art and its dialectical state of affairs can positively accommodate that ‘loss’ as an open text for negotiations.

I remember Daniel Yon’s ethnographic work among boys in Toronto’s Maple Heights High School that is often ‘cover-storied’ in terms of a ‘loss of cultural identity’ because of that school’s intense cultural diversity. The suppositions of ‘identity’ (as arising from fixed core of the self) and ‘culture’ (as unitary and essentialist) in much theory and practice of multi-culturalism is challenged by Daniel Yon through the richly textured and elusive ‘open text’ that is really ‘culture’. His adolescent participants looked at culture not as doctrines but as ‘repertoire of meanings’.

Natesan right from the beginning looked at life around as a repertoire of meanings but in ambivalent formats. It was relocating the viewers into a different reality in which one encounters fantasy and it further ignites ideals. It seemed that there are some calculated efforts to refer to one’s roots in a fresh way, in a puzzle-like fashion. It is like a game – recognise the man or situation or details in the picture while the work starts to burn details.  

Familiar practices of seeing basically try to delineate form and content of the paintings. It will leave one at the end of the day in a ‘feeling of aporia and confusion’ ⁴ . Natesan’s isn’t any physiognomic or psychological realism of sorts to go with such a reading. Signs operate with their own ontology in these paintings. Looking out in the oceans of realism’s referential practices would do no help. These works are actually poised at a transit point between our epistemic fallacies and linguistic fallacies ⁵ .

However, people are going off the tangents when they meet an artist with uncomfortable content.  His entry into the ‘Art World’ intersected with an emergence of art market. Some stuff had already been written obsessively on his painterly skill and career development.  Actually, any attempt at penetrating the presented surface to generate signification or narrative is immediately marginalised. That could perhaps boost him towards skyrocketing prices in auctions for his strange realism and ‘painterly skill’, these being an ‘international modernist’ prerogative. But that will not explain the man and his painting.
The so called content in the picture resists familiar contentions but only to open pangs of an oppressed world. It is the content that can not be identified by a word or phrase. It is the elusive content that boils heavily in this man who recognised the gluttony of ‘representational decay’ ⁶ .

“this is the kingdom of post-civilisation, the disintegrated post kingdom-Kingdom in which everything is falling apart fragmented into atomic bits that look like evidence – clues stacked sorted and organised in some purposeless micro analysis..........it rather serenely contemplates the moment of civilisations passing away or its cyclical sinking into a simultaneously pre and post-literate swamp of representational decay where the centre no longer holds, the image no longer holds...this world of disintegration and ruin which also contains an implicit possibility of recombination, renewal and rebirth .... is both tarnished relic and anticipatory sign. The artist will regain his lost selfhood...through a cataclysmic reversal of western history...”

Thomas McEvillie, Royal slumming: Jean Michael Basquiat here below, ArtForum article (1992)

Natesan’s paintings are more like a painted picture-world. One has so much scope to contemplate on it, much more than being simply voyeuristic. That is a possible reason for his becoming an artist-star adorning private collections of so many competent art collectors of the world.

Let me try out some funny identity-truisms, just for the sheer pleasure of it:
‘Living in nobody’s land (like a land devastated or deserted or forcefully evacuated for either war or development) one becomes invisible in body.

‘Living in somebody’s land (like in democracies or empires with definite middle rulers) one becomes ‘many-bodies’ at once. One is a visible plenty.

 ‘Living in many-body’s land (like in pluralistic societies where symbolic limits of nation state and its rulers are constantly getting challenged) one grows stranger to one’s essential body’. One constantly evolves.

Even a painting with a title ‘take me where I belong’ never perfectly show anybody with recognisable codes of cultural origins but it leaves a fleeting sense of ‘immigrant (philipinos/ thais/ Indians/ Africans/ and many such) entertainers. Artist too is perhaps an entertainer who ‘de-signs’ the picture-perfect realities. The ‘wrestlers’ are just humans caught in action. ‘Investigation’ is done on unknown products. ‘Each (crazy) One Teach (a crazy) One’. ‘Captured Alive’ speak with unique beaks on the borders.

Something done with mind on the reality (beyond essential bodies and identities) can be called ‘elusive’. It is all about ambiguous associations but probably shaping anticipatory semiotics for ‘a civilizational rebirth’. It may be all about looking at culture as an ongoing process attuned to the ambivalent and contradictory processes of everyday life. Culture can’t then be an essential or subscribed state of external affairs, but an internalising mechanism.

It is perhaps like this: as a contemporary artist one can of course settle down to do painting. Painting is the quintessential human act right from ‘the cave’ to ‘the contemporary’. That is but nothing more or less than a choice of modality for creative expression. Certain other ways of ‘doing with the mind’ are equally important in life. It is important to get attracted, to get addicted, to habituate, to internalise, to remember, to get bored of, to sing, to find, to go crazy, to go ahead, to imagine. There are a number of such acts of mind.

Sensitised to this, how can one tragically crash-land to a condition of ‘reality’ (or ‘realism’ simply as a painterly language) when there is no coherent safe terrain anywhere other than the fragmented edges of epistemological fantasies?

Only a rigorous artist can keep on flying like this, painting, doing things with mind...

Notes:

1. In the context of post-war Britain for instance, it was a battle between two competing visions of realism, each of which embodied distinct and separate ideologies, a conflict between ‘modernist realism’ and ‘social realism’. Argument of James Hayman (The Battle for Realism’, Yale University press, 2001) is noteworthy at this point that in the aftermath of the Second World War, not only was there a battle for influence between two superpowers but also a struggle within Europe since its nation-states attempted to reassert themselves, re negotiate their international roles and redefine a European identity in a divided continent. ‘A return to realism doesn’t necessarily imply a return to appearances. What it implies is a new realism of imagination’ observed David Sylvester, an influential critic. ‘The modernist road to realism’ as claimed by Hayman stripped early modernism not only of its drive towards abstraction but to its utopianism leaving in their place a late modernism concerned with formal languages  that were directed at an uncomfortable contemporary response to the vulnerability of the body in a hostile world.
2. Patrice Lumumba was an African anti-colonial leader and first legally elected Prime Minister of Republic of Congo. Wikipedia, the free Encyclopaedia - text will tell you further details.
3. Footnotes, indeed. Natesan was making a poetic and often broken briefing of his understanding. They may not be new facts for somebody already into this area through love for music or for history. They are definitely not ‘info-pieces’. They seemed to me to be sublime acts of a lovely man touching upon a sacred knowledge.  : ‘Rastafarianism is philosophy of black man’s redemption. They do not like Americans. They look down upon them as Babylonians, a system of vampire. Their God is black. Haile Selassie, their god incarnate is heir to Solomon. They believe in Old Testament. They are sheer vegetarians resorting to marijuana. That is an outcaste community. The poor men of Jamaica without chappals played Jazz for tourists as Jamaica was in sixties branded as tourist’s paradise. They developed heavy stuff music like SKA overnight.’ During the three years of 1966 – 69 there developed in Jamaica, fairly slow rhythm ‘Rock steady’, ‘the singable music’ in Natesan’s words. Music and its industry took their ways from those poor men’s ideologies. That history of ‘music as culture of seductive talents’ is available to anybody at the click of a fingertip for us today.
4. Preetha Nair, catalogue essay, ‘Missing’ 1998-99
5. Ibid, about the relocated viewer position created by Natesan’s works shown in the Missing exhibition in 1998, Preetha Nair writes: ‘When we are trapped in an aporia of the chain of signification, disallowing form or language we commit another error of reducing ontology (which translates linguistically) to epistemology (which signification achieves), an epistemic fallacy. The converse could also happen in the case of formalism, an ontic fallacy or with further extension a linguistic fallacy. Avoiding both these could emanicipate both the work and the viewer. Emanicipation is a transition from an unwanted, unnecessary and oppressive situation to a wanted and /or needed and empowering situation, which is then where the viewer is located.”
6. Thomas McEvillie, (Royal slumming: Jean Michael Basquit here below, ArtForum article, 1992) describes this ‘decay’ or in other words ‘historic reversal’ in this way: “this is the kingdom of post-civilisation, the disintegrated post kingdom-Kingdom in which everything is falling apart fragmented into atomic bits that look like evidence – clues stacked sorted and organised in some purposeless micro analysis..........it rather serenely contemplates the moment of civilisations passing away or its cyclical sinking into a simultaneously pre and post-literate swamp of representational decay where the centre no longer holds, the image no longer holds...this world of disintegration and ruin which also contains an implicit possibility of recombination, renewal and rebirth .... is both tarnished relic and anticipatory sign. The artist will regain his lost selfhood...through a cataclysmic reversal of western history...”