Myths and metal

Over an afternoon, the writer reacquaints herself with the charms of S. Nandagopal’s sculptures.

August 30, 2014 04:40 pm | Updated 04:40 pm IST

S. Nandagopal

S. Nandagopal

We enter a small ante room in S. Nandagopal’s beautiful home in Cholamandal Artists’ Village (Chennai), and there’s a sudden blaze of metal all around. About a dozen of the 21 pieces he has readied for his solo show coming up in Mumbai next month are ranged in a semicircle. And in a rather interesting departure from his more usual monochromes, these new works are lit up with patches of vivid colour. Although the artist does not sound too sure about his foray into colour, it works. The new line sticks to some of his favourite themes — Hindu myths and gods such as Garuda, Krishna, Ganesha, Bakasura, Hanuman, Bheeshma dying on a bed of arrows, Kama riding his parrot — mostly familiar stories unfamiliarly told. There are also acrobats and musicians adding to the line-up.

Earlier, we were talking over a leisurely lunch about the title of his show and the overarching theme of religiosity that pervades his work. More than religion, what it’s about, I think, is a huge fondness for the myths and fables that make up the bricks and beams of Hinduism. And that love is something entirely possible without needing to succumb to the religion the myths belong to. Especially with Hinduism, the tales are so colourful and complete in themselves, so self-contained in their circles of wonderment that it is possible to dwell and dip in them throughout one’s career without losing any of the charm of first love.

In describing the ‘historical sense’, T.S. Eliot said that it “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” and spoke of how the temporal and the timeless together make a writer traditional. And Nandagopal’s traditonality, in one sense, is just that — taking the past, making it his own, and placing it in the temporal present. But in the process, with his sculptures, he is also creating a body of work that is going to be the ‘past’ that future generations might build on.

Nandagopal sees his harkening back to the classics for inspiration as a search for order. “If you can find order in the past, you can find it in the present,” he says. “You can’t go back,” he points out, “that would be retrograde; nor can you improve a Chola bronze. What you do try to do is try and discover the working of the mind of the past.”

In searching for that order, it is clear that the artist is still in love as much with his scientific academic education as he is with the artistic legacy that he has inherited and grown up with. When he talks of his works, he is as excited about the metallurgy of his creations — the melting point of iron or bronze, the exact degree at which a copper plate can receive colour, the excitement of smelting nuts, bolts, copper tubes and steel ladles — as he is about the liturgy of the legends they depict. He is passionate about the physics of his sculptures, so that at some point science and art merge in his works quite inseparably. Take, for example, his search for balance and the tipping point, which allows him to create what look at first sight to be unrealistically-perched mammoths that might upset their centre of gravity any moment but magically do not. This scientific temper has also ensured that Nandagopal as an artist remains very rooted in the way he responds to his art. It elicits from him responses that sound almost utilitarian but actually represent a bluntly honest and practical approach to his sculpture. It is the sort of approach (what I like to think of as the ‘cave drawing’ approach to art) which also perhaps explains his fondness for the frontal narrative sculpture — an immediate and direct recounting of what is visualised.

The artist fought fiercely all his life to be free of his father K.C.S. Paniker’s shadow, and it is almost as if he chose to work with metal to be as far removed as possible from the textures and colours that his father dealt with in his wonderful canvases. In the process, it is almost as if Nandagopal rejected the conventionality of aesthetics itself. His creations stand about, sharp, angular, metallic, all edges and no curves or soft contours. And yet, in the very difficulty of their angularity they have a striking, bizarre beauty that is strong and singular.

The adjective that always comes to my mind when I see a Nandagopal is loneliness. They stand alone, these mythical heroes and beasts, in their strange, acrobatic poses and frozen gestures, fighting lonely battles against long-ago demons. Too prickly to love, too beautiful not to love.

The Metaphysical Edge

Where: Art Musings, Mumbai,

When: September 3-25

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