DheRa Art Studio presents

City Lights – One-Man exhibition of Paintings by S.A. Vimalanathan

invites you and your guests to the opening of the exhibition. Inauguration on..

Date: 2nd August 2019

Time: 12:30PM

Venue: Gallery – 1,2,3 & 4, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, No.1, Art Complex, Kumara Krupa Road, Bengaluru.

Exhibition will be on display from 2nd August to 7th August 201 at 10:00AM to 7:00PM.

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My first interaction with Vimalanathan was at a crucial period of his life as an art student, he had just completed his BFA degree at College of Fine Arts, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, and was eager to explore the art world as a young painter. I was approached by a firm to send a candidate as a textile painter to the gulf in 2001. He was fortunately selected and never looked back. I later met him after his return (2007), and he told me that he wanted to pursue his passion as a painter and went ahead to do a master degree in Bangalore University. The young artist was skillful and ambitious, looking around to make a mark in the contemporary art scene in Bangalore.

Vimalanathan was evolving a layered and intricate style of using textiles to overlay his painting, with a decorative and popular aesthetic. His last one person show explored conventional Buddhist representations that exuded peace and serenity. Another was a series of contemporary women were cast as urban goddesses in elegant poses, and references associated with their iconography of birds and animals that were symbols of beauty and power.

Vimalanathan is part of the flux of Bangalore becoming a global city, an IT hub and the shift from ideal utopian “garden city” landscape to dystopian real estate boom. The size and density of the city have erased its identity were urban design is a configuration of built forms, the intense atmosphere, and dynamics of everyday life in the city, its suburban extensions and industrial landscape.

Vimalanathan turned to Nature based abstraction, he invests in the spontaneous gesture of paint, the urban landscape has become a leitmotif, and he was influenced by a plethora of individuals who worked in this tradition.

The city and the elements were celebrated in all its modern interpretations. The modernist grid and the dynamics of the cityscape were converted to planes of gestures and colors that evoked an urban sensibility. It was an attempt to soar from the terrestrial to view and translate the geography of space. The artists explored the possibilities of envisioning an abstract “metascape”. The long involvement with abstracting transient nature and its elements into the remembered landscape of abstraction is an obsession. He used forceful gestures that captured the dynamic flux of artificial light and the glow from architectural. edifices.

This urban terrain is inhabited and melancholic and represents the city as a spectacle. It is a confrontation of an urban artist with architectural modernity, his landscapes often quote the boundaries between abstraction and naturalism. The dense verticality that is in essence painterly vestiges of his life’s journey. The artist abandons the figure to emphasize architectural grandeur with a human presence. The artist looks up at the verticality of urban scale and the socio-cultural aspirations that are associated with the high rises-upscale hotels with views of the sprawling city, that are suggested by a series of still lifes of food and beverages. The terrace and vertical garden open up new possibilities to address the lack of space and greenery. The critical balance of space, housing aspirations and community living is part of the pressures of a growing city and middle-class aspirations to have a home.

Vimalanathan translates the landscape into grids and a system of line, planes, blocks; their machine-edged logic, entering into dialogue with texture and tone, governs the distribution of significant masses over the picture space. The gold and russet are seen with hints of other colors blending and complementing each other. The verticality of the high rises is intersected by a formation of clouds.

This new series reflects his passionate relationship with the city. The artist is a witness to the growth and chaos of development of a city in transit. These paintings are a record of the ceaseless flux and kinetic energy of urban environments, of the energy of chaos and change.

Suresh Jayaram
Art Historian and curator.