BANGALORE: Kynkyny Art will present Travelling Doors, a richly textured, visually breathtaking show featuring the art works of Santhana Krishnan till January 9. Krishnan’s mixed media works showcase a delightful relic of south Indian heritage — the traditional doorway. Vibrantly-painted, beautifully crafted, heavy wooden double doors typically flank the entrances of village homes in the heart of Tamil Nadu. These quaint doorways, embellished with the carvings of motley Hindu gods and goddesses, colourful stained glass tiles and ornate brass handles and knobs, are much more than physical structures which keep homes safe and secure. In the Chennai-based artist’s latest series, doors play the role of documenters, witnesses, metaphors and muses. Travelling Doors takes a nostalgic, vicarious and heartwarming trip down the enchanting bylanes of temple town Kumbakonam, where the artist grew up, studied art and fell in love with the idea of doors. “Doors are omnipresent and travel with us wherever we go. Growing up in the traditional Brahmin agraharams and spending years there made me ponder on the different worlds that existed behind each door,” Krishnan explains. “When I was doing my Bachelors in Fine Arts I would walk through the narrow lanes of Kumbakonam. Most of the houses would have the doors open and you could see far in,” he further adds. Ever since, Krishnan has been transfixed by rustic Indian doors, and has painted them compulsively for the past 15 years, with an oeuvre of some eight hundred paintings. But the old-world doors are not created in passive, still-life mode. Instead, Krishnan’s intriguing works are part-installation, part-painting, fashioned with a combination of acrylic, watercolours and actual wooden door frames. Painted in florid blue, flaming red, canary yellow and parrot green, the frames ensconce a painting of yet another doorway, and sometimes yet another, within them. The multiple entrances are left tantalisingly half-open to reveal the inner courtyard of a traditional village home. The result is astonishing, tactile and three-dimensional, making the viewer want to turn the handle and step right in. The artful doorways open into cosy courtyards and partially-visible rooms, rife with the cheerful paraphernalia of rural life, parked bicycles, water pumps and pots, makeshift clotheslines, crows perched on terrace roofs and wooden furniture and boxes. The homes Krishnan depicts in his art faithfully recreate the milieu of quintessential south Indian homes, with ubiquitous symbols like the Tulsi Mantap, the cluster of gods and goddesses and turmeric markings. The doorways also represent the intersections where inner spaces meet the gaze of the outside world. The art works in fact are an ode the inclusive spirit of rural Indian homes and echo their open-door, everyone-is-welcome policy. There’s also a larger purpose to Krishnan’s door paintings beyond architectural appreciation. The doors are meant to function as portals to transport viewers to a forgotten, bygone era, beguiling in its pastoral simplicity and charm.
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