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Photo: S. Mahinsha

Inner eye: A.S. Sajith with his paintings.

The pattern seems so mysterious and complicated that a viewer has to revisit the frame at least a couple of times to understand the thoughts behind the work. But the mood is conveyed almost immediately.

‘Kari,’ an exhibition of drawings and paintings at Vylloppilly Samskriti Bhavan, Thiruvananthapuram, by A.S. Sajith attracted a lot of art aficionados. A majority of the paintings were in charcoal. Hence its simplicity.

“Primitive, simple medium without any pretensions,” says the artist. Egged on by his friends, Sajith has included some colour paintings also and they stood as a contrast amidst the stark but articulate black and white works.

The series of paintings named ‘Scenes from a cognitive brain’ speak volumes about the process inside our brain “as cognition happens.” The intricate pattern of neurons deceive the eyes; viewers might “see” it as a forest. The complex pattern is repeated in many other paintings such as ‘Binary love, Binary loss.’ The network in that work is, in fact, a city. Concentric circles of energy waves criss-cross the big trees in the forest. Why these patterns?

Sajith says with a smiles: “Well, I believe that we are all part of some network.” He agrees with French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and says that there is no escape from the networks. “But you can take it as energy fields,” says Sajith.

The paintings reach another dimension when one sees that even the human bodies depicted are not spared, but are full of strange inscriptions. The body is not just a body, but it becomes a language. “I don’t understand, why many artists leave the body behind in order to capture the inner essence. You can’t wish away the presence of the body,” the artist says. Sajith voices his protest against the pretensions of many artists through his series called ‘Andy Warhole,’ which is a take on the works of Andy Warhole.

“The famous artist of the twentieth century, Warhole’s anti-art approach had its relevance in its time. But today, many artists try to imitate him without understanding the historic relevance of such movements.” The result was a series of painting depicting masks.

Sajith uses the name ‘Kari’ for his exhibition to envelope all the linguistic, literary and cultural images conjured up the word. ‘Kari’ in Malayalam means charcoal, black, elephant, a kind of facial make-up and so on. With such myriad possibilities of meanings and layers of thought, Sajith’s paintings engage the mind for hours.

Sajith works as Professor of painting in the College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram. ‘Kari’ is his first solo exhibition in Kerala.

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