Simple subjects, sure approach

'My work is like my diary. I think art is like a footprint, but the importance lies in the journey'. Artist A. Balasubramaniam's works, recently on show in Chennai, have a striking visual quality. The present series, a departure from his practice of printmaking, marks a more inward movement in his work. A character sketch by GAYATRI SINHA.

WHAT is striking about artist A. Balasubramaniam's works is the unexpected visual quality of his printmaking - taut, detailed, mathematically logical. On inspection, what it is is the philosophical thrust, that demands both an understanding, and an acceptance of life. That Balasubramaniam is, at 28, internationally recognised, going by the awards he has got, only adds to the amazement with which one views his work.

Balasubramaniam's recent exhibition of drawings at the Apparao Galleries marked a break from his usual practice as printmaker. On the surface, the difference is not dramatic. This series of mixed media works was begun in Vienna during his stay in the winter of 1998. The austere cold of this classical city, and his own isolation in this distant part of the world prompted a renewed vision. In this series, strips of white paper - like fields laid out serially in step cultivation - create a matrix of repetitive patterns. As a counter balance to it are white circular forms, suggesting perhaps negative and positive, male and female energies. In some, the relentless pattern of white strips is balanced by drawing which recalls a field full of flowers.

Like his preceding work, these small works on paper have an apparent calm, a cool objectivity that nevertheless maps a personal journey. "During my visit to Australia in winter, I felt loneliness in the beginning. I think loneliness is something to do with fear and self-questioning. Because there we could see both sides - ego and emptiness". Bala reacted to the expanse of white for its generosity to move, as well as its capacity to suggest emptiness, and wholeness. To Indian eyes, the depletion of colour, the strips of undistinguished white also have strong cultural nuances and are far removed from Bala's own city Chennai with its numerous rhythms, vital colours and urgent movement. This series also marks a more, inward and contemplative movement in his work. That Bala has abandoned colour and intricacy of detail for spare form and near dull monochromes marks the route to a more introspective frame of mind. "My work is like my diary, I think art is like a footprint, but the importance lies in the journey."

Within a decade, Bala's journey makes some sharp angular detours but with an admirable finesse. His chosen format is miniature, the approach very clean and defined, the subject simple despite its philosophical kernel of truth. As a student in the Madras College of Art, he demonstrated a technical virtuosity in printmaking. In a series of works, his subject is the germinating plant, emerging from the ground - marking both penetration and emergence. More importantly, it develops the artist's belief in art as process, as aid to contemplation to more enduring principles that underlie human experience.

Already Bala's control over the medium must have impressed; after college he won the British Council Charles Wallace Trust Award to study printmaking in Edinburgh. The influence of this shift was dramatic; architectural drawings, of amazing virtuosity now dominated his work. The fact that each etching was small, that the building, church or factory interior pressed at the sides of the frame made his point of how architecture is like an illusionary boundary between earth and sky. In man's communion with the natural elements, the building appears like a punctuation mark, a necessary symbol in the grammar of progress.

The extreme, even chilling formalism of these works was followed by a change - again prompted by a shift, this time to the McDowell County Residency in New Hamphire. An airy quality marks these works in which Bala enjoys exploring curve and contour. It also brings together elements like the landscape as well as the elevator and the shopping mall - as in the work in which a landscape is etched onto tags, that carry association of luggage, shopping identification. His preoccupation with the trace also begins here with impressions of the clenched palm in the work "Impression From Body" (paper pulp) 1998, neatly mounted and framed. This argument is taken further in his recent work where he makes the thumbprint an object of contemplation. "Limited From Unlimited", as this series is called, notes man's unrecorded passage through life. The finger print that he leaves so indiscriminately all over the place is recorded by the artist and blown up to form the intense structure of rippling ridges and furrows. It is a minimalist aesthetic that the artist develops - repetition, monochrome, meticulous structure to draw you into the work.

There is a moving vulnerability in Bala's work. For all its technical virtuosity - rarely seen in artists double his age - it also contains a desire to maintain an equilibrium informed of wisdom, an equilibrium that evenly spans the poles of extreme positive and negative energies. Robert Rauschenberg, an artist he is fond of quoting, has, in recent times, urged acceptance and appreciation. As he says, "Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. But it is notable that Rauschenberg had come to this equilibrium after years of fierce rebellion against the American art establishment. Far closer to the human spirit is admission of vulnerability, the potential for pain. As another American artist Maurice Prendergast wrote when he was well on the threshold of his fifth decade.

"Very blue this afternoon. I suppose it comes from abstaining from the customary cup of coffee. You must make yourself a strong man. You are on the threshold as an artist. Be firm and determined. Accustom to master things which you seem to despair of.

"The love you liberate in your works is the only love you keep."

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