David Hall is coming up with yet another art exhibition to treat Kochi art-lovers. This time you can witness some lovely art-works at Kochi’s most popular art gallery. This exhibition is a Group Show of drawings, featuring the works of Sunil Vallarpadam, Nandan, Asanthan and Jayendran.
A gifted water-colourist as he is, Nandan’s use of charcoal in this series is a political choice. His portraits include an impressive array of black luminaries such as Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Mohammed Ali, Pele, Michael Jackson and Bob Marley. In a postmodern mix of the pop and the political, Nandan mounts a counter-narrative of the victory of the marginal.
The charcoal sketches of Sunil Vallarpadam, on the other hand, articulate the haunting, though trans-Indian, iconography of the vanquished. They are traumatic portraits of wounded victims, with their striped trousers evoking claustrophobic prison house ambience, and the solitary crimson of the trickles of blood intensifying their expressionistic angst.
Jayendran’s drawings are imbued with the optimism of a pastoral ecology. They depict a dreamy landscape in which an exotic foliage envelops a naive adolescence. The implied analogy of the girl and the bird in his pictures underscores a lyricism which is at once nostalgic and apocalyptic.
The exhibition begins on the 24th of December 2011 and will go on till the 1st of January 2012. The gallery is open from 10 am to 7pm and is closed on Mondays.
