The canvas has stitches. Sometimes it bleeds red, sometimes grey. On the walls of La Gallery 360 there are excerpts from Ezhilarasan’s diary of images and colours. Pages torn from his Puducherry routines, personal moments and his bullet-based travel expeditions.
Black strokes make up a transistor that occupies the right corner. In an auburn backdrop, the sound waves depicted by geometrical blocks in lighter and darker tones fill up what remains of the canvas. If there is one painting that any layman can relate to, it is this one. It transports you to a time when the radio was what connected the world to you, to those days when with racing heart beats you awaited a favourite song. What doesn’t come easy, comes with double the joy.
A morning person of sorts, Ezhilarasan doesn’t limit his art to certain hours. “When you are hungry, you know it, when I want to create, I just know it. I have nothing in my mind when I approach a canvas. I never even use a pencil. The colours choose me and I go with the flow,” says this artist who works at his art studio named Blue Strips based in Puducherry.
“When I am creating a painting, I don’t need to think or wear masks, it’s the same with sex,” he explains about his work, ‘Art and Sex’ which has red merging with white, the female and male. Most paintings have their titles sketched inside the canvas. ‘Art and Sex’ has ‘Sex’ written as a mirror image, where x is a dreamy butterfly. Words crawl out of the canvas, some alphabets are lost amidst the colours while some titles jut out of the scenes.
He began his artistic career recreating a landscape by John Constable using water colours and now, years later, he chose abstract as his means to transpose images on to the white. It was during his M Phil days that he met Tara N S, his wife who connects him to the city. A theatre artist by profession, Tara hails from Thiruvananthapuram.
When Achilles, Ezhilarasan’s two-year-old nephew walked into his art studio one day, Ezhil handed him a brush which the toddler dipped in black paint and smudged one fourth of a painting titled ‘what they are enjoying.’
Even when he is all geared up for an outstretched travel, his backpack is sleek. He doesn’t carry a canvas, brush or colours with him. “When I travel I like to enjoy the place instead of bothering about paint brushes and pressurizing myself to create something,” says the artist who believes that when you travel, you absorb the place, it stays in you and doesn’t fade. He drew a series called ‘Yak and Sikkim’ seated in his art studio back home, much later after his trip to Sikkim.
Some of his abstracts are more personal like the one titled ‘Dark Chocolate’, an abstract about his first kiss with his wife, whereas ‘It is Not Tied Well’ shows a balloon soaring high with a loose thread at its end, an arrow is used to direct the balloon. Ezhil explains, “That’s how we are, humans try and force themselves to choose a particular direction but it’s the wind that takes us.” The mix and match of colours and juxtaposing images may divulge a whole new meaning to you, not anywhere close to the artist’s interpretation. That’s the beauty of abstracts, you choose what it means to you!
The exhibition is on till August 21.
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