Seeking a natural consciousness that is outside and beyond our body remains at the heart of Arun KS’ recent works: to seek, feel and express in gestures, while the mind is devoid of intention or image, or prejudice. What is produced then is material and gesture as image. In drawing and making from this capacious, free mind is to prevent its instinct for manipulation. This awareness of being, of touching and feeling, and making without the intention of making, become devices for KS to practice consciousness. If only we could give our all to time, without the worldly expectation of making time productive, we’d see and respond to the world differently.
To feel material without associating divinity or ideology with it, is to return it to its natural, primal, (somewhat) authentic form. The image that we see as audiences is purely an image forming in our eyes and mind. Lines and patterns, signs and languages, petroglyphs and shrines — whatever our minds may divine. This shift from the act of seeing to the act of experiencing is also afforded by light and how it touches the surface, and how colour holds onto mark and wound.
Arun KS’ drawings on paper are similar to the earth-works, with more pronounced colour. Mark and motion slowly produce the tenacity of landscape and ruins. This layering and spillage offer gestural clues of the body’s movement, occasionally offering a deceptive form. Everything was made but nothing was intended—and this is the consciousness the artist has been seeking—of making with presence instead of preconceptions.
Mario D'Souza