Preoccupation with the formal

SHANKAR NATARAJAN talks to Chennai based artist A.V. Ilango who has exhibited his creations both in India and abroad.

WHEN I telephoned A. V. Ilango at his home in Chennai to fix a day for an interview he suggested that we meet at a restaurant.

He was there the next day. We moved to a drive in and chose a table at the far side where there was more light and where I could make out the difference between the blues and the yellows. He had brought with him his portfolio of paintings and some catalogues which I went through. Over a cup of coffee, and amid the constant drone of the conversation around us, Ilango spoke articulately about the rationale of his work, the state of art criticism and the Chennai art scene in general.

Ilango is a Chennai based painter who has exhibited his work widely, both in India and abroad. He feels that because he is a "self taught" artist, people do not take him seriously. This includes not only his peers but also reporters from newspapers who have tended to highlight his background in mathematics. It is a bewildering prejudice because there are a number of painters in India who have never educated themselves in art and who we accept as great artists. He says he has progressively distanced himself from the mainstream of Chennai art, whose politics he is now wary of.

Although he feels strongly that his works are different from what is being produced here, a look at his development as an artist, which spans more than 25 years, clearly shows his unmistakable preoccupation with the formal aspects of painting. Yet, when I suggested to him that his works may perhaps share considerable ground with the Madras school of artists of the 1960s and their progeny - be it art that came out of Cholamandal or otherwise and who have all remained to this day the representatives of the "contemporary" art of this state - he disagreed and said this rather amiably: "It is for critics like you to find out that difference." Ilango's oeuvre does show certain differences from the mainstream - in nuance, in subject matter and in source but they are, I think, marginal.

Ilango cites the folk as his chief inspiration, deriving his form and his line from Marapachi dolls, Ayyanar temple figures, the Nagarkallu and the Soolayutham and the bull. Whatever maybe his choice of subject matter, his concerns are mainly with the arrangement of these elements on the canvas.

It is not incidental that he mentions Mattise as a key influence. He talks about his own development exclusively in formal terms; of his "search for a line", his "separation of line and colour", of the problem of "the lines jumping too much" and the introduction of the texture into his work to contain this.

When Ilango spells out his ideas on "Indianess" we realise that he is carrying forward an age-old tradition: "Basically it is linear, flat, decorative, rustic and rugged and the use of limited colours such as brown, ochre and other earth colours".

For Ilango the validity of this "Indianess" comes from the fact that institutions abroad accept it as having "pure Indian expression". Some months ago his paintings were the only ones to have been selected for the Lyon fine art society exhibition in France and awarded a medal. He also cited as a model for authenticity in matters of Indianess, the Parisian and former P.A.G member S.H. Raza, who, somebody once remarked, "has been producing bindus much like a factory in Arrakonam produces bindis". And when I asked if we should not perhaps subvert the occidental gaze, he felt it was "relative".

This orientalism however need not detain us from appreciating Ilango's work. His development throughout his career has been very consistent, he has not jumped about in the name of fashion nor has he stylised and stunted his work just because it sells. He has gone from one "generation" of work to another, carrying forward elements that he then explores in depth. Each batch of work will contain at least 50 or 60 paintings.

The bull image for which he is well known, symbolises the "static and potential energy", and is the conventional metaphor for virility. He says, "Unlike a table that is indifferent to the ground that it stands on, the bull lies on the ground like a mountain. It is solid and its flow is continuous." The rear end of a bull or a herd of bulls recur in his work and he uses their tails to create visual paradoxes of negative and positive space.

For Ilango, the body and the infinite space are a part of each other: "From nothing everything starts. From a point it becomes a line then a form then solid and then nothing again. Space expresses itself as solid forms."

Ilango's concern for bulls is evidently more than an indulgence in their form or in the metaphysics that he attributes to them. He talks about the ground reality too with passion.

"These bulls are taken to the slaughterhouses in Madurai or Kerala. The lorries they are taken in are driven fast; the animals are all tied together and by the time they reach many of them die. It is terrible. The bull is a part of our culture, it toils with man and when it is sent to the slaughterhouse I am very affected, so I keep painting it."

Ilango's other major achievement was a show in London at the Commonwealth Institute in 1995. He has also illustrated the entire English translation of the Silapadikaram, Ponniyan Selvan and Manimegalai published by Orient Longman and is currently finishing a series of pictures based on Balamurali Krishna's compositions.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Next     : On the right wicket