VISIBLE INVISIBLE

08 Jun, 2014 - 28 Sep, 2014

Nungambakkam

Perception is a cognitive conscious act, premised on interpreting and assimilating experiences which gives meaning to an individual’s life. In this respect making art is a form of visual thinking that is accessed through empathy, with the personality of the artist becoming the implicit subject matter in his encounter with the world that implies intersections of psychological forces, intellect, society and events.  Kumaresan’s encounter is dominantly with his ‘being’ manipulating the binaries inside-outside, known-unknown, life-death, visible-invisible full-empty that serves as tropes for his ideas.  The conjunction of opposites conceptualizes a philosophy of ephemerality and temporality experienced in the phenomenal world; clarifying that death does not permit change or transformation - a final act of life; while life provokes changes over time as it is in a process of constant flux. Premising his ideas on these fundamental precepts reinforced through experiences, Kumaresan is driven to rethink and reinvent the same subject and the same experiences, under different circumstances, through varied perspectives, time and place.  

The human form he identifies as a container– one that has strength, endurance, stability, resilience -holding within it several vital elements; saliencies which he extends to nature and life around him. According to Merleau-Ponty, the human body is an expressive space which contributes to the significance of personal actions. The body is also the origin and a medium for perception of the world. Bodily experience gives perception a meaning beyond that established simply by thought. He argued that the knowledge of one’s self and the world around is consequence of the relation to one’s own bodies. The idea of reframing perceptions in tune with different experiences has allowed the artist to offer various view points on the same subject. 

MATERIALSAND TECHNIQUE
Articulating his thoughts and experiences by engagement with different materials and techniques, Kumaresan gives voice to his creative expressions. Employing wood, fiber glass, paper and paint he offers correspondence of ideas with his materials. Intensely experimental in his art making as well as in concretizing ideas, it is this process of divining with different materials that has enabled him to produce a wide gamut of works manifesting different forms of his ideas. 

In order to establish meaning through visual vocabulary, Kumaresan had abandoned painting on canvas and invented a unique idiom of sculpture installations and assemblages.  With minimal aesthetics, which foregrounded shapes as squares, circles, rectangles and triangle, juxtaposed with select arbitration with colours, the thought provoking works added a dimension that makes his art not only vigorously dynamic but also contemplative and meditative. His art though dominantly minimalist in character and conceptually driven, has engaged productively with the element of space and principle of rhythm, as repetition is at the heart of his works making it the salient protagonists. The concept undergirding the works is both memories and experiences resulting out of his perceptions of the world. As a thinking artist he has also discovered appropriate materials, methods and technique to give shape to it. It is in the realization of the forms of his ideas that Kumaresan has created an individual trajectory.