Important Notice

Lot 112

 

Quick Zoom

Surendran Nair’s complex artistic idiom involves the use of both conventional and contemporary imagery and draws inspiration from various artistic traditions including mythological canons, cinema posters and political graffiti, skillfully uniting the mystic with the mundane. His compositions may be described as roguish, ironic or curious, but it is their air of gentle surrealism that prevails over each of Nair’s deeply thought out images.... Surendran Nair’s complex artistic idiom involves the use of both conventional and contemporary imagery and draws inspiration from various artistic traditions including mythological canons, cinema posters and political graffiti, skillfully uniting the mystic with the mundane. His compositions may be described as roguish, ironic or curious, but it is their air of gentle surrealism that prevails over each of Nair’s deeply thought out images.

The present lot, an early canvas titled Pyasa (for Guru Dutt), is an unusual piece in Nair’s portfolio. Guru Dutt was a legendary director and actor in India, credited with several achievements including ushering in the golden age of Indian cinema. Remembered in the history of Indian cinema as the overly sensitive, passionate romantic, his films reflected and critiqued India’s changing society of the 1950s. Before his tragic and premature death in 1964 following a prolonged struggle with alcoholism, Dutt created some of India’s most lyrical, artistic and socially conscious movies. Of these, Pyasa is probably his most celebrated, listed as one of Time magazine’s all time 100 best movies. In Pyasa, literally meaning thirsty, Dutt blatantly portrayed and criticized social hypocrisy, mourning the inability of a self-centered society to understand the purity of a genuine soul.

In this painting, Nair depicts the proverbial coat from the movie, and what appears to be an upside-down helmet holding a human heart – the organ considered the epicenter of love, happiness, sorrow, life and death. Stemming out from the heart is a network of blood vessels, each ending in a blooming red hibiscus. According to Ranjit Hoskote, the coat “…plays a key role in Guru Dutt's film as misleading evidence that results in a case of mistaken identity. The real identity of the creative individual is validated by the heart standing in a bowl and flowering into hibiscus blossoms. Nair's focal symbol conjoins the processes of mutilation and fecundity, fuses the inexhaustible sacred heart of Catholic iconography with the wounded lover's heart of the amorist's narrative. Nair refreshes the vocabularies of melodrama and popular religiosity in his ironic handling, and yet restrains and refines them to convey a subdued atmosphere of tragedy” (Family Resemblances: Nine Approaches to a Mutable Self, Birla Academy of Art and Culture exhibition catalogue, 2000, unpaginated). This work reminds us that even today, no one has been able to fill the void, both professionally and personally, that was created when the legendary filmmaker passed away. Nair is suggesting, perhaps, that since his death, society has remained thirsting for an honest, die-hard romantic like Dutt.

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site