Personal space

V.HARIRAAM'S ART comes out of a long defiant unlearning of our canons and taboos. He wanted to reach the most 'usual' view of the things and stopped painting from life and with oils on canvas. His drawings on paper are now essentially blue prints, and the senior Chennai artist claims: "I am interested in the way spectators' memories influence how they see, and they usually remember."

In practice, this means a tilted space, together with the lucidity of the photograph. But it also means questioning the rectangle because the remembered has an 'irrelevant' perimeter. Each separate setting, each event, calls into being a new shape, each presents itself into a thought form, often cut out against the wall. The kind of realism Hariraam practices has the stridency of conversation, the flavour of populism.

The works are in a way autobiographical - they are about reconciliation, about fusing method and image, the visible public world and private feelings. Taken together, they cover a range of observations about places he has lived in, the people he knows, objects he admires and moods he has experienced. He treats each painting as an entity - images may recur but no two pictures are ever about the same thing. For example the elegant house tidied into a corner of the spiky landscape is presented as an equivalent or emblem for experience rather than imitation after the fact.

Hariraam has always been drawn to graphics and his works reflect his love of matter in their clarity of form, despite his refusal to capitalise on gesture for its own sake. "In fact I have been a graphic artist first and then a painter. Though the technical process is time consuming, the results of printmaking lend a certain excitement which perhaps no other medium does. This is because the texture of the paper and the effects created by the plate are at once seen when a printmaker takes out the final print." This is what he expected and has experienced in his semi- abstract mixed-media works, 25 of which are now on a month-long display at Easel Gallery, Chennai. He has employed a certain technique using handmade paper as a plate and included in the process the use of dry pastels and acrylics with a waterwash method for the basic surface. Impressions obtained from inking and pressing a corrugated paper with a roller, has resulted in disjuncted striations on the mixed media works. He calls his works on paper - "Spaces" - an effort to rehabilitate content and the personal in art - a campaign he has been waging often in the face of prevailing fashion - for many years.

ANJALI SIRCAR

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