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Healing touch

‘Liminal Embodiments’, N.N.Rimzon’s Bodhi Solo in New York currently gets a final touch at the sprawling studio of the artist in Thiruvananthapuram. Renu Ramanath meets Rimzon at his studio and walks along with him down the memory lane. The author brings out the essence of Rimzon’s work, ‘a healing touch’ for the humanity.

“Art should be able to offer a healing touch,” says N.N.Rimzon. “Especially in these times of fear, anxiety and insecurity.”

Rimzon relies on memory and history to evoke this sense of belonging, of healing in his works.  The elliptical, egg-shaped motifs in his works traces the memories back to the ancient times. The egg-shape, the cosmic egg, has associations in almost all the ancient civilisations. Or, the pot has been associated with female deities, with the womb, the primordial shelter. Likewise, the seeking of the self, as in the Buddhist enquiries, integral to the ancient Indian thoughts, leads towards a void, an emptiness, or the realisation of the phenomenon of the world as transitory. “Finally, everything is connected to a cosmic reality,” he points out. 

Rimzon's work

The Thiruvananthapuram-based N.N.Rimzon, whose idiom has drawn extensively from the traditional Indian classical iconography and archetypal imagery, is preparing for his solo show of sculptures coming up in New York in September, presented by Bodhi Art. ‘Liminal Embodiments,’ will be his first solo exhibition of sculptures after 1994 when he exhibited at Galerie Schoo (Foundation for Indian Arts) in Amsterdam, Netherlands. In between, there was a solo show of his drawings, at Kashi Art Gallery in Kochi, in 2006.

So, what was happening during these 13 years ?  “That I haven’t done any solo exhibitions of sculpture during these years doesn’t mean that work was not happening,” Rimzon asserts. During this period, when he was teaching at the Govt. College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, Rimzon had participated in a number of major group shows in India and abroad. ‘Contemporary Art in Asia: Traditions / Tensions,’ organised by Asia Society, New York, presented simultaneously at Asia Society, the Grey Art Gallery of New York University, and the Queens Museum of Art in 1997, the ‘Lines of Descent: The Family in Contemporary Asian Art,’ the travelling exhibition organised by Queensland Art Gallery, Australia in 2000 and 2004- Edge of Desire - Recent Art in India, curated by Chaitanya Sambrani, Perth Cultural Centre, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Asia Society Gallery and Queens Museum, New York in 2004 are some of them.   

“I was able to present some solid works in those curated group exhibitions, which almost amounted to the works of some solo shows,” Rimzon points out.

During these intervening years, Rimzon had turned more to paper works. “I was also passing through a personal and artistic juncture, a struggle that I needed to overcome before moving on to the next phase of my work.  That is when I turned to paper works.” For him, the drawings on paper are not just sketches for his sculptures but independent works, which explore the same concerns as his sculptures do.  “Drawing is always an innate need for me all the time, as an artist.  Drawing has an immediacy, a compactness, while sculpture is more time-consuming.” 

In a recent conversation, Rimzon tries to trace the evolution of his own aesthetic sensibilities from the late Seventies to the present times, looking back along the path he has taken from his student days in Govt. College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram, through his post-graduation years at M.S.University, Baroda and Royal College of Arts, London.

Rimzon’s initial molding as an artist had happened in the post-Emergency Kerala, in the late Seventies. He had joined the Govt. College of Fine Arts, Thiruvananthapuram in 1976, when the Emergency was still on. “The late Seventies, the post-Emergency period, had witnessed the evolving of a radical, Leftist and Humanist aesthetic sensibility in Kerala. After 1977, the Naxalite leaders who were jailed during the Emergency started coming out.  They centered their activities in the college campuses. In Thiruvananthapuram, many of them frequented the University, and the University hostel  where we were staying. The Leftist ideology was having a direct impact on the aesthetic sensibilities. One of our teachers, A.C.K.Raja, had strong associations with the Naxalites. The Janakeeya Samskarika Vedi (a cultural front promoted by CPI-ML in Kerala during the post-Emergency years) was starting to make its presence felt.”

The world of Malayalam cinema was also dynamic with  the emerging new sensibilities at that time, Rimzon remembers.  “There were the film personalities like John Abraham, P.A.Bakkar, Pavithran – all of whom were deeply influenced by the Leftist ideology and a concern for serious cinema. A.C.K.Raja was part of the cast in Pavithran’s ‘Yaro Oral,’ made in 1978. Serious discussions were being held on the Humanist traits in politics and aesthetics.”

Rimzon remembers how their exposure to the visual arts at that time was deeply influenced by a large collection of ‘Studio International,’ in the college library. The collection was a donation from the British Council and it was a big boon for the students as the library and reference facilities in the college which was just being upgraded was still abysmal. The demand for better facilities led to the phenomenal strike (1977 - 1980) of the Fine Arts College students that later paved the way for the formation of the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors’ Association.

“Through the copies of Studio International, we were exposed to all that was happening in the Euro-American avant-garde art movements during the Fifties, Sixties and even as latest as the Seventies.  Terms like Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Andy Warhol and the like, became familiar soon.”  They were exposed to the mutually contrasting influences of a classical modernist and post-modernist languages at that time. “The contradictory nature of these two streams of aesthetical discourse had also proved to be the major point of conflict for me with the Radicals,” he says.  “They were more rigid, I felt. My works were often not acceptable to them, who expressed a strong lineage towards German Expressionism. I’d wanted to explore the possibilities of a visual language without being limited by classical modernism.”

In 1984, he reached Baroda, carrying the loads of influences and impacts received from Thiruvananthapuram.  “The best thing about the Baroda scene at that time was the presence of a group of progressive artists, the so-called Narrative artists. There were a good number of them. Like Bhupen (Khakkar), Vivan (Sundaram), Sheikh (Ghulam Mohammed Sheikh) and others among them. They were starting to articulate about the narrative art at that time; it was a time when the actual presence of the Narrative art was being put together.  In 1981, they had put up a show, ‘Place for People,’ in Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, which later travelled to New Delhi and Calcutta. It is considered a highly significant exhibition. Participants include Sudhir Patwardhan, Nalini Malani, Jogen Choudhari and others of the Narrative school.”

“These artists were trying to move away from the art that had preceded them, towards a more socially-oriented, more people-oriented art. After the Progressives, and what was called the indigenous art (of the Seventies), art was moving in a new direction.”

The artists in Baroda who were using a certain narrative language became interested in the work of his contemporaries. “Our work must have appeared quite interesting to them. Ours was a strong figurative art, with social orientation.  And, there was a definite raw energy, emanating from our exposure to the Leftist political and cultural activism.”

In fact, the cultural atmosphere prevailing all over India matched to that. There was a predominance of the Leftist aesthetical discourse. “JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University) was considered the centre of Leftist thought.  In cinema there were film makers like Ritwik Ghatak, Kumar Sahni. Other fields also, like literature or theatre were also alive. My work, “Man in a Chalk Circle,’ happened during that period; in 1984.  It was part of the ‘Seven Young Sculptors.”

Those works were of a post-modern language, he points out. Yet, not exactly post-modern in nature. Those works should be read as the products of a particular Indian context. He believes that the works that evolved during that period are still not properly understood, may be because the tools usually applied on such works emanates from post-modernist thought. 

“Our aim at that time was not becoming just an avant-garde artist.  The primary concern of me and even of those other artists who were my contemporaries, was not a revolutionary language typical of the avant-garde.  Not something that gives a ‘shocking break.’ Even now, it is not so.” 

He does not think even now that such a ‘break’ has any relevance.  On the other hand, the question was how to link art more with life, he says. Finding life not through heroic forms.   

“Coming to think of that, I believe that the basic concern of the Indian traditional art has always been an attempt to impart a certain healing touch,”  he elaborates further.  “Our society is becoming, to an extent, more profit-oriented, exploitative. Not only in India, all over the world it is so.  The basic approach towards life is changing.  In this context, a search for a humanist element in life has become highly significant. Where can we find out Life ? This question has become very much imperative.” 

This healing touch, this gesture of comforting, is a much-needed one in the strife-torn world of our contemporary times. Fear has become a major concern of our times, as he points out. Strife and violence have become omni-present. The anxiety and sense of insecurity created by fear are haunting the public psyche.

It is in this context that the responsibility of art to offer a healing touch, becomes significant. The language that Rimzon has evolved engages with the dialectical relation between binaries, the opposing principles of violence and peace, in this case.  “The enclosed, poetic space of a work of art can give a healing touch, something people can relate to,’ concludes Rimzon.