Untitled Document

SUSPENDED IMAGES (Ten Rooms) – 1995 / 1996

SUSPENDING IMAGES in Ten Rooms…each room, a mirror of that being living there, has the shape of its dreams…

(Sylvie Bantle)

I have been following Alexander Devasia's paintings since a few years now. My interest in them are primarily two fold. Firstly understanding what the ‘Radical' (1) experience since its dispersal has led various persons in the ‘movement' to opt for, both in terms of choices in art marketing and in terms of practice. And secondly I share his interest in the histories and myths of a common locate (2) After the traumatic dispersal of the ‘Radical' collective in 1989, Alexander extensively drew the life and land of his locate in a realistic mode. Possibly, as I understood it, a strategy enabling a rootedness in the soil, once again, Sudhir Patwardhan observes, “Each drawing successfully evokes a sense of place and time … Forms in these drawings depict sensations beyond the immediately perceived… each of these images seen thick and heavy with layers of childhood associations”(3)

Along the line he made paintings and pastel drawings based on the same locate. “Moving away from the reality of the external, observed world, he creates symbolic, dream-like images… rich as the y are with his own associations and projections. The two modes are like surface and depth, night and day, different and divergent. Yet, there are some drawings here of dusk, of the passing of day and night, which are poised between the two modes like a challenge,”(4)

These paintings on show, pertinently titled , ‘Suspended Images', resolves and consolidates the objectification of that poised moment Patwardhan points out. Rather than reading these literally as disparate suspended assortments framed within specific enclosed spaces, named variously as that of ‘the poet' , antique collector's ‘the believer's etc., these could be seen as the associations of objects transfixed, within a moment of cognition of the real.

Or to put it differently, the things in these paintings are the images beheld in a state of intense condition of enigmatic cognition; the doubt and belief, where the disjunctive, collage mode of presentation surely enable reading open –ended associations and meanings.

Every thing in these paintings, stark, flat, and theatrical, it allows emotional distancing, as every thing appears to be in perfect clarity. They do successfully represent a transfixed moment of cognition, and indeed also work against the incessant flux of time, enabling and encapsulation of the idea of simultaneous presence of past, present and future.

The very first painting, ‘The Poet's Room' is cold and bizarre, as it blindly gapes at the on-looker through the eyes of death. The theatre of the disparate absurd objects of history and of labor; the suspended image of a hanged man, the smiling skeletal eerie fish, the row and the human puppet, invoke death, it could be say of Christ or of a friend. As such, the motif of the hanged man is the starting point of making ‘suspended' objects, a strategy bringing in ironical intent. An absurd waste, but never forgotten. The candles in a row alone are in a space and moment apart, where the moment burns in adoration and love. The same object, a burning candle, nevertheless is suspended in the ‘Spiritual Room', ironically objectifying the adoration and love. Thus , these paintings avoid the closure of romantic essentialism.

Not with standing the fact that the language is surreal and imaginary, the images in these paintings indeed are about things that are experienced. Even one of his own old drawing, a realistic landscape scenery too is suspended in the ‘Believer's Room, with forty blue Patches'. A doubt about the existence of things in the world in these paintings is real. I am not at all suggesting a spiritualist denial of the world to be read into Alexander's point of view. To him, it is always an ‘Yes or Yes' situation in relation to life.

The things not suspended, thus assume significance. See the lightened candles in the very first painting, ‘The Poets Room', There is a sleeping, not as yet really sleeping full-length self portrait in the Magician's Room, suspended in a special way and dreaming blue and red. The magic wand lies below the figure. And, the multiple, flamed, unblinking eyes that watch the viewer in the very last painting,, is also unsuspended.

These paintings on the whole encapsulate the idea irrevocable cold tragedy, the tragedy of life as such, the tragic comedy of ‘yes or yes'. But, indeed the paintings are also about faith and hope, since the devise chosen for painting itself lend a subterfuge; the very choice of a language that enables a distancing from the romantic- tragic; the shift that is effected from the romantic-expressionistic mod e into an objective realism.

I think that Alexander is able to achieve beauty and excellence in these paintings. There is a concentration and an engagement in these, thus crossing-over the cliché of expressionism. For that matter, every mode of language turns-up to become a cliché, including the present one, if it is made out to become a conclusive closure on oneself.

Shivaji.K.Panicker

Baroda ,

February,1998