Fathoming A Balasubramaniam's practice

A Balasubramaniam's work leads to exploration of boundaries between personal and cosmic dimensions, and between tradition and modernity. Formally it combines light and shadow. It’s both amorphous and contained, comprising metaphors, which allude to a belief in the cyclical nature of things.

Hailing from a small village in Tamil Nadu, he received his Bachelor’s degree (fine arts) from the Government College of Arts, Chennai (1995). In 1998, he joined EPW Edinburgh to study printmaking, after which he pursued his passion for the genre at Austria’s Universitat fur Angewandte Kunste in Wien (1998-99). Moving onto a wider canvas, his art seamlessly moves from rusty rural life to awe-inspiring international experiences – a juxtaposition that has let him absorb contemporaries trends even while staying true to his roots and imbibing traditional values. For example, several relief monoprint, comprising one made of alphabet soup, formed part of his first solo in New York.

From a purely Indian ethos and perspective, it seems as if he has managed to outgrow the confines of his context, and move beyond the rather strict formalism of the modernists. For instance, his work at a recent show in Kolkata ('Symbols and Metaphors', CIMA gallery) was a lucid, lyrical celebration, which clearly relished aesthetic imbalance, even while challenging our ways of viewing. Each physical work is akin to a journey that prompts us to retrace the artist’s steps. What you are ultimately left with is not just the physical boundaries of work, but your spontaneous reaction to it wherein the negative space within an excavation results in a corollary.

‘(IN)Between’, his critically acclaimed show of works on paper and sculptures, included of intriguing installations ‘Kaayam’ and ‘Shadow of a Shadow of a Shadow’. While both excavated the unseen and the invisible, the latter in particular revealed the presence of something elemental, and culminated a long process for him in imparting mass to the ephemeral and bringing to the fore the non visible. ‘Kaayam’, on the other hand, reflected on the absence of something very essential, to add to his oeuvre of attention-grabbing works cast from the artist’s body. It negotiated the thin layer of skin, setting apart one’s own being from everything else. The rigid walls yielded to confound and amuse the viewer in ‘In Sounds of Silence and Gravity’, whereas ‘Energy Field and Link’ seemingly tried to defy the rules of nature.