Important Notice

An ardent observer and commentator on identity and sociopolitical change, Surendran Nair draws his images from the abundant global archive of historical, religious, mythological, literary, political and artistic facts, practices and traditions that he maintains. The artist’s provocative canvases link previously unrelated elements from these annals to push the limits of his viewers’ notions of identity, community and reality.

In Nair’s... An ardent observer and commentator on identity and sociopolitical change, Surendran Nair draws his images from the abundant global archive of historical, religious, mythological, literary, political and artistic facts, practices and traditions that he maintains. The artist’s provocative canvases link previously unrelated elements from these annals to push the limits of his viewers’ notions of identity, community and reality.

In Nair’s ongoing suite of works, titled Cuckoonebulopolis (the ideal world between heaven and earth that Aristophanes imagined in his satire, Birds), the artist explores the idea of utopia, a place where one might escape all that is base in this world. As he understands it, the tumultuous relationship between the ideal and the real sets the perfect ground for his socio-political commentary. He explicates, “Though the basic premise of imagining a utopia fascinates me, in the sense that it is a craving for a better world and thus a critique of the times…I use the idea of a utopia as a backdrop, a theatrical device to sharpen the contours of my images; the inner terrain they carry within and the outer, which they find themselves in, as well as to accentuate the tenor of whatever they address…” (The Bad Behaviour of Singularities, Sakshi Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2006).

In much of his work, Nair visualizes contemporary identity as an endless play enacted by individuals. Consequently, the actor and his stage are familiar subjects in his oeuvre. “The model of theatre, especially as distilled in the twinned glory and anxiety of being an actor, is central to Nair’s art. As a child and teenager growing up in a Kerala village, he would accompany his friends to night-long performances of the stylised Kathakali theatre, a form that is descended from the classical Sanskrit drama. His fascination with the ceremonial of theatre is manifest: we see it in his evocation of the ritual of making up and presenting oneself in a persona, literally the mask of another personality; in the gestures of self-transformation that his characters perform, allowing for passage from one shape or identity to another; and in the ensemble action of animated visual image and stimulating text that characterises his paintings” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Openness of Secrecy: Soliloquy and Conversation in the Art of Surendran Nair”, Surendran Nair, forthcoming from Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai, 2008).

In the present lot, the artist depicts a traditionally masked and lungi-clad Kathakali actor from Kerala, seemingly deep in meditation, perhaps ‘getting into character’ for a performance. However, the gravity of subject’s elaborate make-up, vestments and yogic pose are compromised by Nair’s placement of a bright yellow rubber-ducky peering up at him from his feet. Questioning the accoutrements and complicated positions involved in our constant search for ‘identity’ and ‘truth’, and release from worldly existence, Nair seems to suggest that the bells, lamps and lotus-flowers associated with such practices only serve to further ensnare us in the complicated roles we play.

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