Verve Magazine - review

Rural Legend

Text by Supriya Nair

Published: Volume 17, Issue 4, April, 2009

In the Kerala landscapes of Sebastian Varghese and Leon KL, transience and death not only destroy nature, but preserve it, says Supriya Nair

http://www.verveonline.com/72/life/artmart_kerala.shtml

To the human eye, the layers of movement and construction that lie beneath the tranquil landscapes of nature are something foreign to our own systems. In a recently concluded exhibition, Earth Beneath, at Threshold Art Gallery, New Delhi, Sebastian Varghese and Leon KL both showcased their own images of the sustaining processes of nature in their art.

In the work of both artists, the great outdoors takes on a life of its own. More starkly than in cities, the rural environment that accommodates us is greater than the sum of its parts. The imbalances and corrosion that disrupt the natural transformative rhythms of the world become a sort of organic process themselves. In Varghese’s water colours, the biological essentials of the human body meld into molecular representations of the natural world. “The earth emanates a certain calmness and dispassion about all these transformations,” Varghese observes. This in spite of human confusion, in which “we muddle through fresh realities continuously.”

Leon KL’s approach to the quasi-mystical rhythms of nature are to represent them in acute, almost botanical detail, a method softened by his media, soft pastels, charcoal and watercolour on paper. “Environmental degradation is hinted at peripherally in my work,” he says. “There’s a more microscopic look at change at a cellular level, in the human body, in nature.” In Leon’s work, the landscape loses particularity, grounded only in the striking red soil of his native Kerala, and the changes he documents are almost metaphysical.

Collectively, the works emphasise that the human being is not dislocated so much as accommodated in this bio-landscape. There is a certain optimism reflected in this emphasis on the mutation of nature in spite of an inhabitant civilisation running out of sync with it, a sort of faith in the ‘ashes to ashes’ principle, incredibly tolerant of man’s trespasses, and endlessly hopeful about the capacity of this world for rejuvenation and reincarnation. Creativity in their works occurs in spite of, not because of man.

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