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Lot 33

 

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In envisioning the present lot, Surendran Nair has accessed early twentieth century philosophy and art history, particularly Dadaist and Surrealist teachings and the historical development of innovative artistic devices. Adopting anamorphism, an artistic technique popularized during the Renaissance by artists like Hans Holbein, to present his contemporary version of Surrealism, the artist uses this canvas to comment on identity, violence and... In envisioning the present lot, Surendran Nair has accessed early twentieth century philosophy and art history, particularly Dadaist and Surrealist teachings and the historical development of innovative artistic devices. Adopting anamorphism, an artistic technique popularized during the Renaissance by artists like Hans Holbein, to present his contemporary version of Surrealism, the artist uses this canvas to comment on identity, violence and mortality.

Anamorphic paintings are those that involve distortions of perspective, such that the image that the artist intends viewers to see can only be discerned from a particular angle or through a mirror or some other altering optical device. Here, Nair adopts this artistic device to blur the boundaries between several different genres of art and engage his viewers in a conscious dialogue with his work.

Although it is not immediately evident, figuration, still life and landscape share the frame in this dreamlike canvas. While the blood-red torso doubles up as land and table, its various disembodied organs and limbs, along with the weapons that seem to have removed them from their rightful places, are also features of a landscape and elements of a still life. In addition, Nair casts this theater of the absurd with a collection of bizarre objects, endowing almost every object in the frame with a human ear. He also places a mosque-like structure on the body’s left shoulder, a trail of rupee coins leading from the mosque to the helmet at its hip, a solitary camouflaged gecko basking on its arm, and what seems to be a sleeping swan (also with a prominent human ear) at its navel.

This fusion of genres along with the physical flattening of perspective, multiplication of lines of sight, and spattering of bizarre objects and creatures offers Nair’s viewers an alternate version of reality; one where they are not constrained by the identities they are forced to construct in ‘rational’ society. In Nair’s world of strange wounds, it is possible to contemplate the meaning of markers like religion, the violence they engender, and the short span of existence we have to transcend them.

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