A suite of monumental new paintings comprises P.R. Satheesh’s second solo show at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke. Based between Kochi and Munnar, Satheesh’s works are informed by the travails of a largely agricultural community that is threatened by the forces of nature and the state. The canvases pulsate with the precarity of life in this area. As if absorbing people’s neuroses and adding to them his own, Satheesh’s paintings thrum with anxiety. Tight knots of colour, generated from layers of pigment, give rise to figurative forms. At times locked within the paint work or otherwise flittering on the surface, Satheesh captures the emotional strain of those forced to make existential decisions about their homes and livelihoods.
In Are they aware?, faces sharpen into view and dissipate while fuller bodily forms struggle to emerge from the painterly lattice. This interlocking of man and matter reflect the primordial relationship Satheesh has with the act of painting. The flickers of colour and soft strikes of paint that accumulate on his expansive canvases are products of a survival reflex. The overall kineticism and turbulence of the images give insight into how he perceives himself as influx and insecure in the world.
Satheesh filters these environments through himself in a manner he calls ‘subjective landscaping’. His paintings forge a connection between his internal and external terrains. ‘There is magical moment’, he says, ‘When you try to connect nature within you and the nature outside you’. There are ways Satheesh uses the region’s destructive potential to reflect on his mortality. Munnar, being at the confluence of the Muthirapuzha, Nallathanni and Kundala mountain streams, forms a major watershed and is, therefore, vitally important for Kerala and Tamil Nadu’s water levels. Loose, blue pools of colour in Seeing the world as reality (2021) evoke this geography where swathes of forest, cut through by tributaries, give way to waterfalls. Satheesh treats these aqueous areas with a distinctive gesture. Long swipes of his brush in sections of block colour are a counterpoint to the thicket of marks elsewhere. These emptier spaces create a sinister tranquility. Less of a balm, the waters almost seem to churn with a lethal undercurrent. Impressing that death is never far away, on the cusp of their vortex lie bodies.
Munnar frequently experiences deluges and landslides that wipe out life. With the onset of heavy rain comes the threat of rising and overflowing river banks. Stop chasing the rainbow (2022), evokes the fear that can plague residents of the area, especially those in housing susceptible to damage. Memories of past catastrophes remain potent for Satheesh. In the foreground of this piece, a figure flails in a watery expanse. Light streaks and sprays of white suggest the limbs thrashing and consequently churning the water body. Satheesh’s figures, like this one, are painted sparingly with an economy of line to the extent that, at times, they can feel like apparitions on the brink of slipping away. He asserts, ‘I don’t believe in the mere physicality of man. I believe everything is under gradual change and there is an instability.’
The eyes Satheesh paints are as rudimentary as his figures and yet, whether mere black dots or fuller, they hold and communicate a broad spectrum of emotions. Sunken in the verge of his mark making in A state of wanting more things (2022), are sets of eyes that signal to the multiplicity of feelings that can be embodied by a single individual. They are startled, pensive, even peaceful as they seem to contemplate an impending event. At times tethered to the outlines of a face, at others unattached, they magnetise and guide the viewer beyond the painting’s charged and haunting surfaces. Drawn into their depths, the works can be psychologically revealing and the paintwork’s volatility, expressing empathy, also performs a cathartic function.
That is not to suggest that Satheesh’s method is the ‘mindless kinetic activity’[1] that cynics have associated with Pollock nor is it truly spontaneous or rapid. Satheesh’s is a slowed and deliberative process that has, in instances, seen single paintings unfurl over years. ‘Working on the canvas with the brush gives me immense relief in my life. I see it as very precious,’ he explains. Ahead of beginning on the canvas, he draws with pen on paper in a manner that he considers ‘intuitive not automatic’. Stored away in a plan chest, the drawings are akin to a diary, a private outlet for recording the everyday and cleansing the mind.
On these pages, a continuous fine line is shaped into beasts and birds, ink blots add flourishes. The meandering forms have an affinity with Mohan Samant’s figures seen in cutouts like Pandit Madhusagar Family (1978). Samant stated, “We must address the monstrosity within,”[2] and it can be said that Satheesh’s drawings are part of his own self reckoning. While not discernible in his paintings, the spidery scrawls could well exist beneath the visible layers in a subterranean world. The paintings alternate between frenetic and diffuse, harsh and delicate, precise and unplanned with an underlying sense of Satheesh’s vulnerability. In a work like A lonely outsider (2023), Satheesh’s sensibilities are most exposed. In the lower section, a self-portrait, of sorts, is subsumed and diminished by the congested paintwork suggesting a person in tension with the world around him.
Satheesh does speak of a reclusive childhood where he isolated from his brothers. To this day he prefers to be alone. That does not limit his compassion for others, he describes how he finds himself in all his figures. His work, from a wooden sculpture of an older male figure made in his youth to some of the first paintings he made in Bangalore that featured large groups of men held behind fences to now, has people and their experiences at its core.
Dr Cleo Roberts-Komireddi
[1] William Rubin, ‘Jackson Pollock and the modern tradition, part I’, ArtForum Volume 5, Number 6, February 1967, https://www.artforum.com/features/jackson-pollock-and-the-modern-tradition-part-i-215312/.
[2] Cited in Ranjit Hoskote, ‘The One-Man Avant-Garde, Mohan Samant: Cutouts and Works on Paper, 1974-1985’, Pundole Art Gallery, https://www.pundoleartgallery.in/DLL/image.ashx?imagepath=exhibition/pdf/35_pdf.pdf