The ideological climes that set the milieu for the artists Sebastian Varghese and Leon K.L are different. But they have a common approach to the issues of nature and earth.
Renu Ramanath features the characteristics of their work,s which are currently shown at the Threshold Gallery, New Delhi.
When two artists like Sebastian Varghese and Leon K.L., who belong to two generations of artists are clubbed together in a two-person show, it is not the apparent similarities in their approaches alone that work towards formulating the dynamics of the show; the dissimilarities also play a significant role in creating the specific chemistry.
Both these artists graduated out of the Govt. College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, but Leon came seven years after Sebastian. These seven years had seen a sea of change in the social fabric of Kerala, their home state. Sebastian’s formative years were spent in the Eighties, which saw the fag end of the era of high-strung, radical, cultural and political activism in Kerala. Leon, on the other hand, grew up in the Nineties, by which time the socio-cultural landscape of Kerala had undergone some drastic makeovers.
When Sebastian was growing up in the hilly village of Thiruvambadi in Kozhikode district, a centre of farmers migrating from the southern districts of Kerala, the atmosphere was still charged with the remnants of the Naxalbari movement that swept through Kerala in the Seventies. Its ideological residues still coloured the cultural activities. Anyone who had the least of affinities with cultural activities still got easily dragged into the vortex of activism, be it theatre activism or film society activism. Sebastian had his days with the film society movement in Kozhikode. But soon, his inner quests had set Sebastian in another course, which led towards the much-famed Gurukulam of Guru Nitya Chaithanya Yati in Fern Hill, Ooty. A late entrante into the world of art, Sebastian was working as a teacher much before joining the College of Fine Arts. On completing his graduation in painting, Sebastian left for the USA, where he lived for almost 14 years.
When Leon was growing up, in the Nineties, the air of cultural activism had almost declined. There were still possibilities, but only for those who sought it ardently. Unlike the early Eighties or Seventies, there was no whirlpool to drag in even those who dallied on the shoreline. The individual was more or less left to his/her devices to find answers. For some, it must have been a liberating experience, but for many, it must have created more confusion.
These dissimilarities in background continue to be manifested in the present works of Sebastian and Leon. Viewing from a peripheral perspective, both artists have explored the same subject, the surrounding earthscape, or ‘Earth Beneath,’ as the show’s title goes. But, to locate the works of both these artists within a single bracket will be a little too far-fetched, as the concealed dissimilarities surpass the apparent similarities, as I’ve already pointed out. The external subject matter might be the earth, the surrounding world, but the gaze which selects, chooses, edits and augments the surrounding sights is totally divergent in both artists.
Sebastian’s water colours emerge from a close scrutiny of the surrounding urban landscape. These works are the continuation of his earlier series, ‘Alluvium,’ which he exhibited in Kochi in 2008, his first solo in India. As Sebastian has pointed out while working on the present series, “Some of the elements I am incorporating in this body of work are deliberately ambiguous as they oscillate between the organic and man-made.” It is a sweeping survey that takes in the immediate vicinities, the urban wastelands, the bizarre, the mundane, the mysterious and aggressive forms of life that dot this landscape. It is a pick and choose process. He singles out various elements and juxtaposes them to create a familiar-looking landscape littered with urban debris.
The series of works coming under the title ‘Conservatory,’ explores the world of carnivorous or insectivorous plants, a rare group of the plant kingdom that trap and consume insects and small arthropods for supplementing nutrients. These plants are delicate and survives only under specific conditions. There is an inherent irony in the very existence of these plants that present a picture of being ‘carnivorous,’ of trapping and consuming unwary little insects, but are so delicate that they will just wither away at a drop of ordinary tap water.
There is a certain sense of airy lightness, a sense of buoyancy, in Sebastian’s water colours. The plantlife is floating, along with the debris scattered on top. The water is underneath, supporting the plantlife, and getting choked by it in turn. The level of dexterity that Sebastian is striving to achieve with the application of water colour is evident in the works, especially in the larger surfaces.
This lightness in Sebastian’s works is offset in Leon’s soft pastel drawings that have a solid, earthy texture. There is a certain tenacity that weighs down his imageries. They are robust and sturdily rooted in earth. Leon’s approach is rather microscopial and dissective in nature. Apparently, he savours the process of painstakingly working out the details.
The dissective nature of Leon’s approach can be seen to be increasing in intensity on closely observing the progress of his works during the last couple of years, especially from his last solo exhibition, titled ‘Terra Firma,’ held in Kochi in 2007. It was in that show that Leon had started training his attention particularly towards the subjects, laying earth beneath.
However, the gaze which had at first been focussed on vegetation like the underground tubers and corms started narrowing down as the work progressed, with more detailed cross section of the life forms under the soil layers beginning to appear. Though his imageries are largely related to vegetation, a kind of metallic debris also starts appearing strewn around the underground life forms as his exploration proceeds.
Leon’s process of applying pastels has a deliberate assiduousness. He works slowly, building up the closely packed pictorial surfaces inch by inch, with an inherent tautness. There is a steady progression from the external, from the exterior, to the inner recesses, to the world beneath your feet. The intricate detailing, especially in works such as ‘Embryonic -1,’ and ‘Embryonic-2,’ emulates the microscopical images of the plant tissues from where life forges ahead. The more one goes closer the image, the more it gets complex and concentrated.
The lucidity and solidity of Life are contained within the rudiments of earth in the works of both artists. Life flows forth from earth, and it melts back into earth, only to regenerate again. Their works are an exploration into the sustaining and depleting aspects of life, of earth.
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