A prosaic eye would see nothing more in R.M. Palaniappan’s art than a few wayward lines without, curiously enough, the least reference to form. But shouldn’t art depict form with lines? Quite. But the Chennai-based artist makes the reverse journey, frees lines from form, setting them off into self-propelled trajectories, sometimes racy, sometimes measured but always unbidden, unpredictable.
It all began with an obsession with astronomy and architecture for the artist as a boy. After all, how is the architecture of space charted in human understanding if not as lines in motion in avoid, with orbs, orbits, constellations, shooting stars translated into patterns of shifting lines? How is the earth’s topography mapped in aerial shots if not by filtering depth and detail into the dynamic geometry of lines? Add to that the boy’s memory of a war film where airplanes whizzed around Berlin’s Reichstag, leaving sizzling trails behind. They gestated in his mind, these lines in kinetic play, and slipped into his art.
In a Calcutta show in 2008, his paintings usually had a straggly, spindly line racing about, knocking around, a rootless tramp, its beginnings and ends interchangeable in a purposeless, Sisyphean no-arrival, no-exit ritual of search. The kind urban Everyman is caught up in. Now, 13 years on, in the online show of Delhi’s Nature Morte gallery, you find that the line has matured into a broad, flat ribbon; its tread is more sedate, even balletic, as it glides from point to point,turns sharply, composes intricate movements across fetching colour zones, taking on the enigmatic avatar of some arcane, wedge-shaped script.
But wait. There’s also a frisky, pesky sidekick, a thinner line that twirls and pirouettes, sometimes shadows the senior, mimicking and mocking, gets into a tangle with it, tries to trip it over, as it were, coming in the way: a sort of sharp, distracting, impish, alto counterpoint to a baritone. Like a nimble puppeteer, Palaniappan infuses into the Grammar of Randoms — the title of the show—both infectious brio and a range of teasing clues that you decode in your own way.
Artworks by R.M. Palaniappan. Nature Morte
Fortuitously, in Reimagining the Object, Ritesh Meshram, presented online by Bombay’s Chemould, complements Palaniappan. Both in the way the precise, flinty contours of Meshram’s found objects are divested of functional content, turning into autonomous patterns, and in the way the distilled residue of terse metal packs in a tight, driven energy and intriguing ellipses in its stillness.
His Nine recalls the edgy poise of calisthenics; the exuberant fountain of copper-plated wires in Untitled, Brick, is catchily Op-Art; the chance formation of carelessly bunched spikes in Off-centre is buoyed with a quirky chic; the fragments of metal in elegant disarray in Beginning from Nowhere resemble undeciphered glyphs. On the other hand, In Between the Lines holds out multiple references. Do the objects quote the pre-Aryan lineage of tools? Or the weathered grace of the tribal physique? Or is there a capricious wit in tinkering with the found objects and their famished forms so that they echo another lineage, the one that descends from Giacometti and the pranks of Duchamp?
Wit leaps to hilarity in The Yogi and the Elephant where Amit Ambalal, presented by Delhi’s Gallery Espace, lampoons, in pastel and watercolour, a capitalist yogi who’d slipped off an elephant while doing his asana stunts on its back. The question that comes to your mind — after you stop laughing, that is — is, how on earth could this artist, in his late 70s, have regained the nonchalant irreverence and magical gaucherie that are the natural gift of a child of six?
