http://kashiartgallery.com/sebastian/index.htm
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Registers of
the Beginning, the End and the “Already There”
Kathleen Wyma
The title of this exhibition takes creative liberty with the definition of alluvium. Typically this term refers to the detritus deposited by receding waters or glacial forms; however, within this context it is strategically used to highlight the liquid undercurrents of Sebastian Varghese’s images and what is at stake in their visual registers. With this brief introduction to Sebastian’s first solo show in India, I would like to offer up possible avenues of exploration.
Phenomenon does not manifest in a story line - it is just as it is. We connect the dots to make the story interesting, but the dots have some space in between, a silent and still space.1
In due deference to the words of the artist, this is how I have connected the dots between his visual expressions. The narrative that follows is not strictly linear; it takes heed of the spaces in-between and is laid out in series of propositions and possibilities. In doing so, I hope that my words allow the silent and still spaces, referred to by the artist, to remain.
For humanity, history is that “already there” which runs back into prehistory, just as the individual turns back toward the shadowy pit of birth which attests that we are in the world because we have come into it. It is in this way that the work of art is already there to solicit our experience of the aesthetic object and, as such, offers us a starting point for our inquiry.2
To speak of the “already there” may seem unnecessarily arcane and I beg my readers indulgence as I put a finer point on this term. It is an expression that comes to us from phenomenology and it serves to celebrate the immediate and tangible experience of the world as a pre-given. In surveying the work of this exhibition I am struck by the possibility that these images chart an unnoticed but always present world to offer a sensorial inventory of the quotidian. The juxtaposition of the organic and the man-made is a leitmotif of Sebastian’s smaller works; however, it is remarkable how he equalizes the vegetal and the manufactured through the fragile translucence traces of his brush. As silent witnesses to the world as it is, images such as Cola and Switch serve to exemplify rather to explicate. The story line, if there is one, is left for us to construct.
Take for example, Glove. Typically a glove is worn for protection – it serves a prophylactic function. It can be a sign of care, caution, labour, (or in the days of old) leisure. Within this image the existence of the object is loosely mapped fingers intact and ready to wear but its delicate transparency seems to belie its formidable utilitarian function. Cast adrift in a muddle of bulbous aquatic vegetation, the glove may serve to elicit feelings of transience or isolation but its uncanny appearance does not necessarily demand a rational response. Like a specter we expect to it disappear without a trace at any moment, swallowed up by ebb and flow of the backwaters. The glove’s watery outline offers no clues as “the how” or “the why” and although the image registers the glove’s existence; the task of determining its essence - its past and its future - is left undone.
The PERCEIVED WORLD is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth.3
Perception, according to preeminent phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, is not an intellectual act but rather an experiential engagement based on both immanence and transcendence.4 Immanence works within the domain of reality and is derived from the relationship between the artist, the object and the act of witnessing; whereas, transcendence is afforded through the image – the residual document of the artist’s perception. The image, in its transcendent capacity, always contains something extra that goes beyond what is visually presented.5
It is those “extra” spaces that allow a dialogic encounter between the audience and the image. Instead of offering answers, Sebastian’s images encourage endless questions. For example, does Skull urge reflection on mortality or the cycles of life? Is this an image of the end, or one of a new beginning?
The artist’s perception is the keystone of all visual expressions. It sits at the base of the creative impulse to allow the superstructure of the image to steadfastly emerge. The restorative capacity of Sebastian’s agile hand finds compelling expression in the large works of this exhibition. Within the Flora series the end and the beginning are equally indefinite. Rendered in almost obsessive detail, these formidable landscapes capture the jeweled essence of water foliage and offer an intriguing visual counterpoint to the loose gestural brush strokes of the smaller works.
I find Flora -3 particularly intriguing in light of the fact that Sebastian has indicated that the images included in this exhibition can be likened to “aggregate deposits of memory and observance.” 6 Within the vast field of Flora-3’s watery vegetation barely discernible horizontal bands disrupt the landscape as it recedes into space. These demarcation lines are repeated throughout the image and seem to visually punctuate the expression of memory. Yet, I am left wondering if the registers of recollection begin with the water’s edge or with their mirrored complements deftly captured in the water itself.
While many of the Flora works loosely attend the principles of perspective and allude to a horizontal recession into space, the lone diptych in the show, Flora – 4, offers a different tact. There is no formal beginning or end in this paired image and unlike many of the other larger works it offers no easy passage into its maze of detail. Still, the seductive quality of the colour and the repeated pattern of the plant life lure us in to investigate. The beauty of this tandem painting is undeniable; however, there is an undercurrent of foreboding looming just below the surface of the water. It strikes me that there may be a tacit danger within this image. Though the two images reflect one another like a mirror and thus appear arrested and stable, upon entering into the fields of foliage one wonders if there is a risk of being subsumed, not unlike the glove, the skull or the switch.
Like a cartographer Sebastian charts the spaces of his experience, brings them down to earth and gives them tangible form. These registered documents, once turned out into the public domain, become fluid, unfixed and open-ended much like the watery world they represent. From the smaller to the larger more sustained work, Sebastian’s images offer up avenues of exploration. Like intrepid travelers we are at times confronted with the extraordinary and, at others, the prosaic. Though Sebastian’s images endlessly traverse across a porous divide of the general and the specific their strength lies in their ability to create a conceptual in-between space. It is a space of flux and flow that extends beyond the images and evokes a ceaseless drift between the micro and the macro, and perception and reception. It is their “not this” and “not that” quality that allows these images to sit as registers of phenomena. They vanquish all endings and beginnings to privilege an “already there” and perhaps like the words of a poem, these images can be cast as rhetorical devices set in the stanzas of visual experience.7
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1. Sebastian Varghese, “Narrative Truth,” - unpublished essay (May 26, 2008).
2. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans.,
Edward S. Casey, Albert A. Anderson, Willis Domingo, Leon Jacobson
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), liii.
3, 4 & 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences,”
trans., James M. Edie, in The Primacy of Perception
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 13. Ibid.,15. Merleau-Ponty, 16.
6. See the conversation between the artist and Rajan Krishnan in this exhibition catalogue.
7. Here I am drawing from Sartre’s distinction between poetry and prose.
He argues that prose is used to present ideas; whereas, with poetry
it is the words themselves that are the things presented.
See, Jean Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of Ego (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).
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Kathleen L. Wyma is an Art Historian, living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
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