Surendran Nair is an artist who defies description, his work more so.In the melee of India Art Fair’s VIP-vernissage this year, I was missing something. I could not quite put my finger on it till I took a second round of the makeshift stalls. Yes, the numbers were down this year (from 104 to 80), and there was more glitz and glamour; Delhi’s swish crowd was swirling the wine glasses, but the greats, yes! The greats were missing. Last year, when I had met Anjolie Ela Menon at the venue, her assessment had been quite prophetic—dismissive of the tinsel. This year mostly the floss remained. So it happened that I could not find Surendran Nair at the venue.
Some of his artworks were on display but there was nothing like the huge mural that had made up a wall of one of the two Sakshi Gallery stalls in the last Art Fair. Origins: A Tableau – Epiphany (Cuckoonebulopolis), 2013-2012, had visitors crowding in the narrow passageway. As usual, Nair had art aficionados scratching their heads in bemusement trying to arrive at the epiphanic conclusion hinted at in the title.
That’s the effect of Nair’s work on the uninitiated. It helps then to be armed with a little understanding of the man to start peeling the meanings of his works—the idea behind this interview.
Describe yourself as a person, I ask him, and he laughingly complies. “It is difficult to answer it without a touch of irony to it; nonetheless, let me try—may be someone unassuming; someone quite reluctant to arrive at early conclusions about things around; someone who is prone to look at the ironies and the lighter side of things?” he leaves a lingering question in the air, same as do his paintings.
His works too, leave one fumbling for answers. They are all open-ended, inviting multiple conclusion each informed by the history and perception of the individual viewer. Nair’s work like him has a hint of irony, a stroke of mischief, a brush of quizzical, and a large dose of mythical and something close to surrealistic. One of India’s preeminent artists, Nair, defies being boxed into clichéd compartments. Some critics have tried to label him as surrealistic in the tradition of René Magritte, but Nair would have none of it. He has more of symbolism and an admixture of mythic and mystic, both of the West and the East, and yet contemporary, modern, classical, mundane and surrealistic come together to construct a vocabulary of images that uses the cosmic man as its grammar and forges an identity that is distinctly Surendran Nair.
The making of Surendran Nair, the mythmaker and the artist, goes back to Onkkoor, Kerala. The 57-yearold artist was fond of doodling as a child, “if I remember correctly, from the primary school days onward,” he reminisces. But colours did not come to Nair for many years. To be precise “from the high school days and the pre-degree days,” he recalls.
If it had not been a chance discovery of a small book of drawings by the early masters of European Art in the college library, ““I think that was the only book on art in the entire library, which was absolutely inspirational...Probably it is also a book that made me aware of the seriousness of art as a practice,” perhaps the world would have been deprived of a great body of thought-provoking work including the controversial An Actor Rehearsing the Interior Monologue of Icarus. This 2000 painting which ruffled right wing feathers and was withdrawn from National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, catapulted Nair higher than Ashokan Pillar on which perched his actor in contemplation.
They were also exciting times—the 70s—says the artist with a twinkle. “I had a number of friends with whom I could discuss the altogether new, unconventional and exciting approaches and expressions that were in full flow in disciplines such as literature, cinema, art, etc.” And then comes the great confession, “I think I got distracted by such things a great deal and ignored my studies.” Be what it may, it was beneficial for India’s art heritage. We stand enriched, I say, by his digression. He laughs.
It was Nair’s brother who finally gave formal shape to his wandering muse. “He suggested that I go for the fine arts. Since I hadn’t shown much of an interest in academics, he thought applied arts could be a career option.” It was at Fine Arts College in Trivandrum that Nair gradually started to understand the nuances of art as a practice and discipline. The artist who evokes the imagery of surrealism and the mystery of mythology to paint contemporary sociopolitical realities, fashions his canvases “at the normal hours; between 10 am and 8 pm.” But adds, “I can work even all night and beyond.”
The output: Metaphors on canvas shrouded in a quietude of colours, with the dignity of giant murals, expressed through the language of Indian and western mythology and art weaving intimate ‘Nairicons’ that engage viewers in crucial dialogues concerning contemporary issues of individual, community and national import. The human–sized tableaux are dramatic yet precise in presentation. Nair talking about one of his works, Corollary Mythologies, had remarked: “I imagine it to have political undertones, however subtle, which is informed of history, mythology, real and imaginary events. Art history, notions of tradition and identity and its relationship with modernity, of language, sexuality, politics, religious and other faiths, etc. Without emphasising any of these in particular, I address these issues simultaneously. Sometimes rendered sentimentally, literally, cryptically or otherwise metaphorically oblique, they are both detached and reflective and at times often with a mischievous gaze, making innocent jokes, and at other times being ironical and quizzical too.”
His paintings are rich with these many subtexts and undertones. It takes a little time and an understanding of his native background apart from Greek and Indian mythologies to penetrate the many layers of his work. The drama behind Nair’s work is replete with the rich cultural tradition of Hindu deities and performing arts of India including Kathakali. The expressive lexicon of dance expressed through elaborate makeup, fanciful costumes and enchanting eye movements and hand gestures further accentuated by props, is used by Nair to express the poetry behind his paintings. The pictorial strategies of surrealism like the dream landscapes, the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated objects, and symbolic creatures further add drama to the canvases. The result of this disparate fusion is a unique aesthetic blending of classical Indian representational techniques with a figurative style similar to those of surrealistic masters but that is very Nair—a commentary on the sociopolitics of post-colonial India through ancient myth and contemporary imagery.
Nair’s family was uncertain of his choice to go into painting though. “They were hoping that I would go for applied arts,” says the master, adding “they were uncertain whether or not it would be a wise idea in terms of earning a livelihood.” Nair even thought of teaching in the early days of struggle as an artist. I am aghast at the thought of the wasted talent. He only smiles. “But unfortunately or otherwise I was not selected. After that I haven’t thought of doing anything else.” But he did a lot of painting, producing an enviable body of work for posterity.
Nair’s first solo show was in 1986 or 87, he thinks, at the Lalithakala Akademy Gallery in Ernakulam, sometime in the month of August. “It was pouring incessantly all the five days of the exhibition. So, hardly anybody came to see it, other than a few friends.” The dampener of a first show did not douse his spirits though. But, immediately after, a few months later, the same body of works was shown in a two person show at Gallery 7 in Bombay. “The response I thought was quite encouraging. I remember senior artists like Tayeb Mehta and Akbar Padamsee coming to see the show and saying few encouraging words.”
The fledging’s repertoire evolved over the decades. Starting with strong pen and ink drawings and etchings and lithographs in works which were primarily portraits in the 80s to oil and canvas paintings, best exemplified in his corollary mythologies—an artistic reinvention of ancient allegories as modern day fables. At the fag end of 1990s, Nair created a rather large and exceptional portfolio of hand-coloured etchings collectively titled The Labyrinth of Eternal Delight that had critics comparing him to Italian surreal artist Francesco Clemente.
I ask him if there are any projects that he still wishes to do. “Nothing special I would say. I am trying to cope with completing a series of works collectively called, Cuckoonebulopolis, loosely inspired by ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes’ The Birds, begun in 1999. The title piques my interest and I ask Nair to explain. “If I may talk about Cuckoonebulopolis, I may be able to give you a fair idea of what preoccupies me currently,” he begins. “Cuckoonebulopolis is something like a utopia and it is one of the translations of the Greek word Nephelococcygia coined by Aristophanes in his play. Though ‘Cloud-cuckoo land’ is the most popular version, I felt that it is a bit too descriptive for my liking and it also seemed to foreclose the possibility of exploring the ironies of things that was what I was looking for. Now, my interest in this idea of utopia dwells only at the most elementary level, and not a full-fledged imagination of an alternative. I think the moment one engages in imagining an alternative becomes, by default or not, a critique of the times that prompts one to imagine the same. It is this basic aspect that I am interested in, and not a watertight proposal for an alternative resolved of all problems.”
By default, Nair has also managed to give an illuminative peep into the functioning of his imagination that lends colour and contour to his blank canvases. I take my leave intrigued at the myriad possibilities.