Binoy Varghese explores the world of imposed innocence

New Delhi based Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre presented an interesting group show, entitled ‘Surviving Sagas’ earlier this month – courtesy Ashna Gallery. It featured works by five leading contemporary artists, namely George Martin, Murali Cheeroth, Binoy Varghese, Vivek Vilasini and S Gopinath.

An elaborate note on them brought out the nuances of their respective art practice and work. They are artists with different stylistic approaches, albeit all sharing a keen interest in the contemporary human beings’ materialistic and existential issues. They together explored the aspects of survival against the backdrop of the socio-economic and cultural anchoring of people to see how their survival is made possible by creating micro narratives out of their own lives. Here is what the gallery mentions of artist Binoy Varghese and his practice:

His artistic realm is full of micro-narratives of those disposed and dispossessed by a system of knowledge and power. He captures the faces of so many children in various garbs and places them against the most beautiful foliages and flowers. With a lot of happiness and verve these figures look at the viewer as if they were caught in a bubble of eternal innocence. Positing, someone into the state of eternal innocence is an exercise of ideological power that often we see both in the public and domestic realms.

His idea is to ‘re-present’ this innocence and engage the viewer to decode the secrets of their innocence. Binoy has been employing this method of representation for a long time and he uses this special way of juxtaposing the image of an innocent child against a backdrop, which is not so ‘natural’ to him/her. As a humanitarian artist, he puts forward a subtle critique on the system that produces such dispossessed children.

Of late, the artist has been attending to the issues of religious dispossession that has become a common characteristic of our much acclaimed democratic society. He stands up for their dignity by repeatedly painting their small little worlds.

(Information courtesy: Ashna Gallery, New Delhi)