The Custodian of Dy(e)ing, 2016
184 cm x 612 cm
Oil on canvas
K L Leon, Kerala, India
Artist's Note:
While new forms of subjectivity and sensibilities are being excavated and defined through different modalities, painting remains a true study of our existence. In the context of South Asia, artists have been relentlessly investigating history to challenge contemporary mainstream suppositions and prejudices. But there still exists a certain construct that expects artists to take part in the, still-ongoing, post-colonial process of redefining cultural specificities while still being mired in the colonial and pre-colonial clichés about nation/regional identity.
I believe that politics without imagination is equitable to bureaucracy; however it's juxtaposition with man-made tools and cultural produce allows me to establish a world that reflects my ‘locality’ without being merely nostalgic. And without this recourse to nostalgia, my work seeks to confront broad shadows of doubt that plagues notions of history, culture, migration, and place.
The work for Young Subcontinent, curated by Riyas Komu, is an exploration of historical, cultural, and political roots through still-life allegories. But the danger with allegories is that it can easily be misrepresented as myth when placed out of time and history. Capturing these allegories, as a painter, then becomes an act of making emblems out of lands, myths, cultures and lives. Therefore it becomes essential that the work also address the critical methods of archiving, research and intervention while harnessing new narratives to amplify perception.
In that context, the work seeks to explore landscape(s), through historical and cultural vignettes, and its increasing alienation from its nature and 'roots' as a result of expanding industrialisation and urbanisation. This landscape not only takes advantage of the lived and living histories of the land and its people, its colours, memories, cycles of birth and death, and even its flora and fauna but also of contemporary art's incompleteness and ability to host many narratives without conforming to a determined discourse. Though "nostalgia" is often invoked as an yearning for 'purity' and the 'good old times', my landscape(s) seeks to assert that the artist too is very much a part of the world; that the canvas itself is not a transcript, but rather a carefully created construct where the local seeks precedence over the global.
I believe that politics without imagination is equitable to bureaucracy; however it's juxtaposition with man-made tools and cultural produce allows me to establish a world that reflects my ‘locality’ without being merely nostalgic. And without this recourse to nostalgia, my work seeks to confront broad shadows of doubt that plagues notions of history, culture, migration, and place.
The work for Young Subcontinent, curated by Riyas Komu, is an exploration of historical, cultural, and political roots through still-life allegories. But the danger with allegories is that it can easily be misrepresented as myth when placed out of time and history. Capturing these allegories, as a painter, then becomes an act of making emblems out of lands, myths, cultures and lives. Therefore it becomes essential that the work also address the critical methods of archiving, research and intervention while harnessing new narratives to amplify perception.
In that context, the work seeks to explore landscape(s), through historical and cultural vignettes, and its increasing alienation from its nature and 'roots' as a result of expanding industrialisation and urbanisation. This landscape not only takes advantage of the lived and living histories of the land and its people, its colours, memories, cycles of birth and death, and even its flora and fauna but also of contemporary art's incompleteness and ability to host many narratives without conforming to a determined discourse. Though "nostalgia" is often invoked as an yearning for 'purity' and the 'good old times', my landscape(s) seeks to assert that the artist too is very much a part of the world; that the canvas itself is not a transcript, but rather a carefully created construct where the local seeks precedence over the global.
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