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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  Shibu Natesan | Stranger than reality
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Shibu Natesan | Stranger than reality

Shibu Natesan's photographic paintings are inspired by one of modern art's primal challenges

Shibu Natesan’s art is inspired by the people and places in his mind. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/MintPremium
Shibu Natesan’s art is inspired by the people and places in his mind. Photo: Priyanka Parashar/Mint

From a distance they look like photographs, but from close quarters they turn into something rich and strange. Shibu Natesan’s paintings, most of which are executed in a starkly realist mode, may seem direct, even sedate, at a glance. A daintily dressed couple against a landscape; an elderly man seated in a bright yellow chair; a lady standing against a prospect of flowers—these are but scenes from a life anchored in the mundane. But the hypnotic intensity of his colours and the tender outline of each form grapple with one of modern art’s primal challenges: how to capture the true essence of the real.

Natesan, whose solo exhibition, Uninterrupted Speech, opens to the public today at the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi, rarely shows in India. This is his first offering in eight years in the country. There is no routine to his working pattern. There are fallow months when he patiently waits for inspiration to strike, but once he gets into the swing of things, the days fly by in a blur. “I spend most of the year in London with my wife and family," Natesan says. It does get lonely in the West, but then “an artist is an isolated being anyway", he adds.

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Landscapes bathed in a strange light recur in Natesan’s work

Born in Thiruvananthapuram in 1966, Natesan came to painting quite early. Although his father was a painter, he was neither encouraged nor discouraged by him to take up art. “Of course, it helped to have someone as a model when I was young," Natesan says. Eventually, he graduated from the College of Fine Arts in his home town before enrolling for a master’s degree at the MS University in Vadodara, where he got to know some of the pioneers of Indian modernism, including the brilliant Bhupen Khakhar. Later, Natesan would go on to spend a few years at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Each of these phases left decisive influences on what would evolve into his signature style—which is a distillation of several high modernist modes of painting. As an undergraduate in Kerala, Natesan was profoundly affected by Latin American literature, cinema, and expressionist art. These gave way to an absorption in the work of the American artist, R.B. Kitaj, while in Vadodara, though the impact of Khakhar is also palpable in the narrative affinities of his paintings. This was followed by a strong interest in the art of the Belgian symbolist painter, Léon Spilliaert, during the years he spent in Amsterdam.

Eventually, Natesan’s approach would be refined by the photo-real paintings of the German artist, Gerhard Richter, and the lush figurative art of the British painter, David Hockney. But Natesan is too subtle and intellectually agile to be content with simple allusions. The paintings of immaculately landscaped grounds that feature in this show—Landscape With Urns, for instance—recall not only the elegance of Hockney but also a neoclassical purity veering close to the Baroque. Forking paths along avenues of trees end up in what looks like a lake—it’s the geography of Last Year at Marienbad, one of the most enigmatic films by the French master, Alain Resnais. Then there are nods to the old masters as well, notably to Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat.

His similarity with Richter, Natesan says, is more superficial than imagined. “Richter used the photograph for political, cultural and personal reasons entirely different from mine," he explains. He came closest to following Richter’s footsteps while painting Missing, a series of portraits of people who have been officially declared lost. But in general, photographs enter Natesan’s universe quite effortlessly. For him, the act of making a photograph is a way of overcoming nostalgia for people and places left behind. And then, to use that photograph as the foundation of another form of art is to memorialize the past in a deeply personal way.

“We are drowning in a surfeit of images appearing in various media, especially in television," Natesan says. “But for me, the photographic image is unemotional, in that it merely documents what is actual." In his paintings, on the other hand, Natesan tries to push the limits of the real to achieve effects that a photograph will never be able to reproduce. The challenge, as he explained in another context, is in bringing “the impossible… into the possible, and the imaginative into the actual".

Uninterrupted Speech is on till 30 April, 11am-7pm (Sundays closed), at the Vadehra Art Gallery, D-53, Defence Colony, New Delhi (46103550).

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Published: 16 Mar 2013, 12:06 AM IST
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