“If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint,” said painter Edward Hopper. Avinash Veeraghavan’s show at Galleryske is a creative and inquisitive reverie. The artist’s oeuvres in the show are a visual treat to the eyes.
1024 Names, the latest leg of Avinash Veeraraghavan’s long-standing journey has all the elements in it to make it a wonderful show. Veeraghavan, time and again, has relentlessly and literally torn apart and reconstituted fragments of myriad meanings that may have been obsessions while asking the same questions in different ways: What is left of the self and of consciousness when those meanings that sustain it are torn at their roots? How is there a sense of unitary wholeness that remains, even as a psychic shadow? If the meanings that constitute everyday life are obsessively multiplied or divided from original supports, does their emotional and psychological hold over us diminish? For decades, he has earnestly and unsparingly examined the radically incomplete and impermanent sense of self. This show finds the artist in a mature, quiet and contemplative mood. In a host of ways, it speaks of his recognition that life and personal history can bear multiple overlapping meanings without any promise of coherence. The show most directly engages with Avinash’s twin fascinations — the nature of the religious, and the extraordinary fecund and dynamic digital world that forms the core of his visual practice. In his rendering, these fascinations meet and converse; images replete with religious, personal or universal significance are repeated, torn apart, multiplied, layered, erased and melded using different materials, forming the core of his philosophy. His gaze is omnivorous, but also disciplined and guided by logic and girding of the digital and religious world which he seeks to combine. Some of the startling works are The Leela, a celebratory installation that provides an entry into the vast multiplicative interiority the artist wishes to explore. The eclectic and utterly joyful lights often used during pujas and festivals are reproduced as if roots of a Banyan Tree — enlarged and refracted back to the viewer along with her own image through a series of densely placed mirrors.
In the next piece, Spectrum, we come face to face with a series of crushed cloth that fits into a frame in a seemingly haphazard but taut manner. the artist will be featuring in the much-awaited Kochi Biennale as well. The art show is an ideal start for the year 2017 and we hope the year throws up some good arty surprises.
— The exhibition is on till January 7 at Gallery Ske.
— The writer is an art expert and curator.
