The canvas is a harlequinade of colour. Like a Sunday fete, full of clowns and costume and celebration, jostling for attention - gaiety and, somewhere, melancholy, are here.

For Achuthan, painting is not a dialogue, not a conversation, but a communion with colour. Sometimes a battle. From early expressionist journeys he comes to this tranquil, deep sense of joy in light and colour for themselves. Celebratory, and the canvas throbs and... The canvas is a harlequinade of colour. Like a Sunday fete, full of clowns and costume and celebration, jostling for attention - gaiety and, somewhere, melancholy, are here.

For Achuthan, painting is not a dialogue, not a conversation, but a communion with colour. Sometimes a battle. From early expressionist journeys he comes to this tranquil, deep sense of joy in light and colour for themselves. Celebratory, and the canvas throbs and is alive with the joyous, riotous spread of colour. Melancholy sometimes, even tragic - and colour sweeps across the canvas , like wind and rain lashing the landscape, eroding it into a strange and wondrous new world of beauty.

Sometimes a symphony, sometimes a shriek this wash of the rain. Nonchalant, or obsessive: like a shower, or a storm. A surge of colour kept at bay, a canvas awash with sandy gold, or white of a sail tossed furiously by the sea. Lustrous, beautiful, very brave, even heroic.

Achuthan's is at once an exciting, energetic and strangely tranquil art - the problem that haunts his work isto transform his vision of intractable reality into something "other". For the viewer, to view is to invite a kind of haunting.

Kerala villages, beaches, temple evenings - a childhood remembered. Remembering is reinventing, and each time reinventing the last time remembered . Colours move across, layered and shifting ,like sands across a desert. A Sunspeckled mosaic, drumbeats remembered in silence.

Achuthan's is a tumultuous oeuvre. A sumptuous, dreamlike feast of colour. A remarkable economy of style, and grace. An unforgettable meditation on art, on love, on passion. On this crazy thing that we do, living.

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