In the whirlpool of memory spun

The premises of the latest in line artistic compulsions have, in one way, little to contribute to an assessment of M.R.Renjan’s work. We can only avoid bringing to his lore-informed visionary invocations irrelevant pre-conceptions of appreciation and judgement if we attempt to situate his work in relation to those values and meanings to which he willy-nilly does not align his spirit.

While Renjan is no outsider to whatever is deemed ‘modernism’, the imaginative qualities that he frequently seems to project in his works are drawn from a still living tradition, and as is at times reflected in the Indian dance forms, in especial those of Kerala. That tradition, exists both in its art-wise higher rung, as much as in the rites, rituals and spiritistic communion, of the folk (or rather those of the rural people, close to the earth). You just have to eye Renjan’s inks on paper to realize this aspect of his genre. Well, even if any other artists happen to share his unusual vision, his acute, spare, honed-to-the-bone manner takes his work immediately to an elevated plane. It simply becomes compelling, and especially so the paper inks, as mentioned above. Still, the acrylics on canvas too can show an equal mastery, a treatment which energizes and quickens his potent fables on the demonic plus the primordially divine. These works, a bit like rough-cut diamonds, are on purpose not overly sweet-coated or prettified.

So this art, facing forwards and inwards, is of images of dramatic suspense, where the natural and the supernatural are engaged in a tete-a-tete. The works owe little to the appearances of observed reality. Such images exist purely to act as the vehicle of a visionary enough world that is the instrument of possession and purgation. In other words, they exist as an interior analogue which seeks to orientate and drive the viewer’s consciousness towards the realization of unawakened primal possibilities ─ specifically those of the day’s excessively bland, unreasonably rational, urban mass humanity. In their import Renjan’s images are iconic and as such their presiding paradigm is the contemplation of the twilight zone of our protean but restless minds. His predisposition towards envisaging the pandora’s box of the inner world is timely. He  manifests it as charged with the traces of the fabulous, much as is realized, for instance, in Alice’s Wonderland ─ a theatre of meaning – pregnant, surprising possibilities, of strange spectres and visitations.

Renjan is certainly at pains to personify experiences, to reveal the identity, the nuance, the composite being of humanity. He is interested in transforming the humdrum surface events and in taking us aback with his masked personages. In this way, the artist is not a ‘realist’. Normality is well and good for practical purposes, but beyond that, surely, is our life of hidden apprehension and suspense, with all its attendant dangers. And yet instructive wisdom issues out of it. Thus the artist’s imagery serves by withdrawing the viewer from the world of objects and his simplistic responses to them. He brings the viewer up against the unpredictable itself, and nothing lesser. This enactment, even in  small space, plays the drama of our erratic souls. Those by whom such a theatre of chimeras is peopled, have as their task the search and prefigurement of the mysterious sitting right in the middle of our sometimes too cosy living space.

When the images of art become too self-regarding to the point where their sole obligation is to claim that they are no more nor less than what they are ─ as in the case of pure abstraction ─ then they are shut off from the seamless matrix of values and meanings which give them life. So they diminish their claim upon us, which, ultimately, negates the very conditions for their own survival. They have to pretend that it is not the condition of human communication to involve intelligence, perception, convention, memory, and so on. But then, an image is not some sort of quasi absolute, rather it carries a burden of meaning and so must, of a necessity, stand in sound relationship to the strange but yet core truths of our deeper lives.

Renjan’s images thus lead not merely to the surfacial psychology of the artist. Instead they are drawn from a whole buzzing world behind outer appearances. Those images are, thus, inherently symbolic of our cultural or essential being. Fact is that the manifest truth alone can be the source of the real.

Renjan’s artistic mastery is undoubtedly characteristic in the realized perfection of his key iconic images. These indeed are a contribution to the art of our day.

Renjan’s comparative isolation, as artist, is not only due to the somewhat unexpected nature of his visual language but also because of the fact that an imaginative vision, such as his, is presently without protection in the cultural concerns of shallow modernism, as often, right now. His exploration of a forbidding mental territory is courageous and it has yielded authentic results, which even as they offer us the necessary jolt, extending the duration of the musing mind. He makes no standard, or merely ‘good’ gallery art. Along with a few other of his compatriots, he carries the ghost of the past right into the broad daylight of the present times, thus enriching our kitty of the creative imagination.

─  KESHAV MALIK