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An ambience of space
B.O. SHAILESH'S installation titled "Body Surface" on the Living Wall of British Council is offered in four parts, necessitated by the door-openings on the wall. Shailesh has sourced pictures and sketches from his own stock, painting just a few panels anew — paper pulp reliefs, metal foil glittering, silver foil (velli rekh) burned with acid, paper crushed, paper slats stuck in a manner to look like Venetian blind, rectangular block in relief over a square plane — many of them painted to negate the relief. Earlier, Shailesh had painted earthen drums — tappalam (a folk instrument of Tamil Nadu), framed them singly or together to compose pictures.
Many of them have found entry into "Body Surface". One common denominator is size. Almost all of them are small in scale; most of them are square. Energised by the artist's work, the static wall pulsates with energy. What the artist has installed is kept alive by the viewers visiting, viewing, and connecting and by inscribing comments on the wall, which becomes part of a bigger picture. On the wall, diagonally opposite to the entrance — intended by the artist to be seen first — are eight, framed squares, depicting a lingam each, set around a larger central picture of brightly painted medallion. In pitch black and silver foil, the phallic form is delineated through thread from beneath. The blue wash in some lingams alludes to the Himalayan snow and a small blood red patch in one to Rudra. The serial light, flickering along the inner edges of the central piece in a phallic shape, brings to mind the puja altar reverently placed above the cash counter in dime stores and hotels. Invariably, Shailesh translates forms embedded in the religious consciousness into pictures. In this instance, a constellation of lingams on orbit around a bright orb is the outcome. Twin panels — six ft. fabric hung with wooden reel — engage attention by their ribbed texture, amorphous colours, vague forms, white rain spatters, red patches and occasional drawing, in black, of a hand here and a knee thereThe centre piece is an assemblage of disparate works huddled together. Severed heads on an ornamental stool, another tumbling head down in paper pulp relief, another has grown a moustache of tender shoots and sprouting flowers, some heads have grown spikes... it's a visual medley.
Twenty small frames engirdled by a veritable Angulimala of rapidly flashing serial lights - red, blue, yellow, white.
Seven works that are symmetrically arranged on either side and close by, convert the whole ensemble in to a face with flapping ears; the assemblage connect to the central theme face.
A charcoal sketch seemingly of the innards of stomach, in fact a scissor head from student days which the artist found so sensuous that he had to include, was distasteful to me. A pair of similar works with drawings of vases is indicative of the future path the artist could take. Silver foil has been burned to (dis)colouration, stripped to the base sheet and is stuck on board in slats. On one is drawn in black a series of vases tumbling while another has a stack of vases arranged in a row.
The rather secluded fourth section of the wall is incidentally the Comments wall. The three vertical figure paintings are vibrant in their use of X-ray style and colours, combination of soft rendering and crisp draughtsmanship, boldness of handling the figural and the abstract on the same small pictorial field.
On the end wall, the artist has summed up the show by bringing together some elements and components that have been used in the other parts of Body Surface.
The work is menacing and bewitching, disturbing and amusing. Shailesh's aesthetic sensibility is his sustenance. The seemingly haphazard arrangement and random presentation belie the carefully programmed and the rehearsed. To the viewers, his work is less of connotation and more of annotation.
RAMAA NARAYANAN
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