The paintings and drawings of Aji VN serve as visual chronographs marking his journeys across diurnal and transcendental time, but also as compasses exploring the possibilities of the world. I am struck by how the same painted scene folds many orders of time in states of intimacy and reliance—the geological time of rocks, the lifespan of foliage which will leave its trace on the rocks, the sea as the most ancient, ancestral matter we know, the celestial formations dotted above. The hours of light and darkness, the view of horizon, verdant landscapes—the paintings condense the span of days, months, years within their frame, sedimenting layers of paint as chapters of accumulated hours spent at the ever-renewing shoreline or gazing from the window of a temporary studio.
Reflexive to the vastness of these paintings is the furtive intensity of drawings that relay an inhabited moment with a sense of immediacy. Here, we encounter the texture of terraqueous sites, boulders as capsules of deep time, and explorations of finite moments. Shifting between the unknowable and intimately held, there are small portraits of Aji’s daughter, often with her gaze turned elsewhere or presented in an oblique profile that retains the quality of immersion and inwardness of the natural world—at once with us and somewhere beyond.
Arushi Vats
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Variations on a Tide
Aji VN in conversation with Arushi Vats
We reach Aji’s studio, which is at a distance from the sea, sitting at an elevated site reached through winding roads. A garden embraces his home, which is also the studio, and it is alive with trees swaying to the wind, leaves scattering light on the burnished earth, and the eruption of many sounds from all directions. There is nothing pruned in this garden, it is a formidable space. We write from a place, we make from a place, and I ask Aji, I was reading about you and that you spent two decades in Netherlands, which is a significant period of time. And now you’re in Trivandrum, a familiar place, a home that was paused and is now remade by this pause — how does it affect your work? What imprints has this left on your practice?
A moment before the stone springs.
Basically, I could look at myself, me in a different way, that itself was a big difference, how I looked at myself, how I had transformed. For example, I was trying to paint landscapes in India, but I never thought or never could find something meaningful in it. So, it was always that you like to paint what you see around you, but it cannot bring you meaning. After going to Netherlands, that problem vanished. I could see the importance of what I was painting. I don't know why, but practically that was the change I felt. I think that must be a change in my thinking, it must be how I started looking at landscapes, from a different position, a different angle. I was doing seascapes before. We see what is happening on earth, but not in the sea. It takes time for the slow transformation all around us — trees grow, geology works, landscape changes, erosion, all these things happen in a longer span of time. But when you look at the sea, you see all these things in the sea, but they disappear in seconds, you see all these forces forming and receding. The same energy that transforms the land is also transforming the sea but the waves appear and disappear in seconds. That was a revelation, so that also gives you an emotional... intellectual energy to paint. Painting, making drawings in charcoal, all these processes became something akin to... the universe itself, how it comes into being with dust particles, so finally, my drawings become dust things. Everything is dusty, granular, powdery. They come together and become you, me and everything. You organise the powder, the charcoal powder, into a form. So that gives another creative impression. With that knowledge, you can analyse many other things… I find that is quite interesting, creative.
And how does colour, the chromatic scale, which is essential to your work, seep into this process of exploring a question? It sits on the work like a presence.
I think of colour as an experience, as holding opacity, depth. With the sea or the sky, I try to think of colour as a tactile thing — not a feature of the sea, but a flat thing in itself. I think the tactility of colour is what I was coming to, because it's not about a tint or a hue, it's about a presence, as you mentioned, which is something different. It's not serving just an aesthetic purpose, there is a philosophical purpose there, with the colour, which I thought was quite interesting. You catch hold of something, that kind of feeling which you were unable to do before. And the time that you take to make at least the larger works, the paintings, that takes a long time. Mainly because all these kinds of questions arise. You have to solve those knots slowly… like a small area of the sea where colour piles…
To think more about the making — the composition, how you construct parts of the canvas.
I do a lot of studies, so I have all these things, then I make them, I build them my own way. So, I know where to where the waves should come, or a tree, then you can have another space there — you are reorganizing this on your own terms. You are very clear that you are not making any reality. I am making seascapes but still, I know I am not making a real sea. I am doing something else. That gives you some kind of knowledge about reality.
With painting, I am always drawn to the sense of stored time, like a battery, its defying the natural order of entropy. Even if the pigment erodes, the colour degrades, you see a different hue from what was once seen or imagined, there is something that stays on as an intensity.
With painting you can easily make statements, the medium is assertive, its heavy, oil is temperamental, you have to negotiate a very different relationship with control. I like oil, because you can have a result, but it's not very fast, so you can study things, which takes time, and you can gradually bring up things. It's not just a fast thing, and it's not, you know, that much of an expressionistic thing. It's a bit more meditative, some time-taking aspects are there. It is a disciplining medium, it disciplines you.
Later, we return to the beach to look at the sea in the moonlight. Aji graciously leaves me with the waves crashing at my feet — and I feel a surge of infinite solitude and belonging to this moment with the sea. At night, your eyes reveal a palette of the world so mottled by the play of lights at different distances. The vanishing point becomes a mediator between light and its dissolution.