First time writing on my Paintings by
Radha Gomaty. Thank you.
" THE SPEAKER OF STATIC "
A troubled man sits fiddling endlessly with the knobs of an invisible radio set. He has lost contact with all known radio stations and is desperately tuning in search for one that makes sense. However all he hears are smatterings .Unintelligible relays of gibberish fading in and out of an eddying storm of relentless static. Finally a station comes through, its relay loud and unequivocally clear. The content of the relay is however just this…Static ,a clear uninterrupted stream of it!
In a flash of insight he straightens up, relieved .
The inconstant is constant, the flickering is what is stable and gibberish is all there is to have of tuning into radio stations anywhere ,be they religion ,Ideology or Illusory intimacies .It does not matter how clear-cut ,comforting and well scheduled they seem to be or how effective they are in skillfully engaging our attention away from the only pursuit that matters -The earnest all absorbing query into who one is and what remains when all the trimmings fall away…
There is no more anxiety now when he resumes his fiddling.
For now it is clear that the chatter of static is not to be simply blocked out, complained about, driven away or judged. It is to be listened through& through with the keenest attention so that the evasive space that underlies and holds the static may be heard /glimpsed even if in flashes as it peers back at us through the gaps in the shifting restless shapes that the static has created.
For me, Johns Mathew is that man with the invisible radio set.
What I shall refer to as ‘static ‘ in this writing is the leitmotif of Johns’ paintings -that strange seething mass of bizarre beings : Man, Woman, Animal, Bird, Object that morph into one another engendering more of their strange kind in an endlessly proliferating interlinked chain that expands in all directions all at once. Their appearance does bespeak a certain violence but one that is once or even twice removed. For this ‘Static’ is not the Nightmare per se but only a fast fading memory of one that has nothing more to teach but this-that for all their fascinating din, apparent dominance and hyperactivity, their nature is essentially ephemeral ,of no consequence .Only an enquirer engaged with the nature of such ‘static’ intensely enough to see through its nature eventually looks to 1) recognize and keep in check its origin within as also, 2) to move beyond its noisy pall to the zone of lucid silence that contains it.
Johns’ style of art practice involve extra-ordinarily long cycles of completion with visits and revisits sometimes separated not just by days or weeks but months and at times ,even years. Not surprising ,considering the fact that someone with a slow , emotionally introverted and essentially conservative nature as Johns, has spent a lion’s share of a lifetime overcoming and finding ways to sustain through the impacts of deeply felt ruptures of Faith as also their long cycles of manifestation and healing. Perhaps the worst of these was the suicide of the brilliant young sculptor KP Krishnakumar on 26th December 1989 at the young age of 32 , rudely ending the brief but meteoric trajectory of the IRPSA [Indian Radical Sculptors &Painters Association] that he spearheaded,one with which Johns was closely associated as an undergraduate student of Painting in the Faculty of Fine Arts , MS University ,Baroda .
In the months of utter confusion that prevailed following Krishnakumar’s tragic demise, whole heartedly heeding a call to abandon all formal institutions to revive what was left of the IRPSA’s radical legacy, Johns abruptly decided to quit Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda just three months short of completing his M(Fine) Programme. That such a singularly foolhardy decision was little more than a Don Quixote’s heroic charge at the windmills was a realization that hit
John Giornos inescapably when he suddenly found himself on the streets without the shelter of a student ID card or proper qualification or relevant experience of any kind at hand , with which to sustain himself physically. The ‘static ‘ roared in his ears in full force as hitherto undreamt of realities began to raise their heads around him .All Johns wanted to do was to surrender effacing himself out of a form of existence that had hitherto spun wholly around Art & Ideology with that magical eraser called ‘normal life’. But there was nothing even remotely ‘normal’ about life as its mad fortuitous torrent swept him along as he describes, “a piece of driftwood”.
A couple of decades passed performing all kinds of jobs creative, menial or both. An opportunity to assist a film director from Greece who was making a documentary on Faith & Ritual practices amongst peoples of various communities across countries deepened into a long standing nurturing friendship that changed Johns’ life in more ways than one. Opportunity opened to travel widely in India, South East Asia and Europe which afforded Johns, at the same time, the even more precious opportunity to clear out heaps of inner debris and the courage to open certain spaces padlocked within himself. A pivotal inner experience happened during a trip to Tiruvannamalai,the abode of Ramana Maharshi during the course of shooting the film that quietly and permanently altered his perception of Self and Life.
For a long time now Johns had more or less totally bracketed Art out of his existence .This was not because Art was no longer dear or important to him but precisely because it was so precious a zone that he needed to be cleared of all old persuasions, all lingering negativities and any specters that may still remain of long dead beliefs. Dividing time between Greece and his beloved hometown Kozhikode, it was however in the solitude of his rugged rustic residence on a Greek island that Johns seriously resumed his work at the easel.
What I witnessed in that heap on his studio floor in Kozhikode too were his first struggles with ‘static’ where his initial approach to try and push the ‘static’ away with the same conviction with which he closed down the relays of all the ‘radio stations’ that had hitherto played in his head had altered. As he began to listen, the ‘static’ evolved into form, samplings from 2009 to 2016 of which are, on show in this mini-solo.
The intensity of Johns’ attempts to trace and externalize the origin of this ‘static’ within his own interiority was evident to me on my visit to his studio where the floor was heaped with papers of various sizes, even torn fragments Some of them were marked with just a wash and a scribble or a few terse brushstrokes .On some were forms like apparitions hesitating on the threshold between visibility and invisibility. Despite their ‘incompleteness’ their terse intensity teeming with conflicting aspirations and internal struggles immediately gave off that distinctive unmistakable scent of sanctity that genuine works-in-process have.
From these, through the layered working that raises the ‘static’ to visibility ,I pick out ‘Just a Thought ‘ as the apt key to understand John’s persuasions ,formal and otherwise.
A man is seen at the lower registers of the painting, head slightly atilt and arms bent upwards as if balancing the stupendous head load of a thought that even at its moment of origin has instantaneously branched into a fascinating melee of ‘static’. Not only is this an attempt to seize the nature of thought itself with its conditioned identification with memory [past], desire[future] and random wishfulness [ a futile tendency to want to change the former that cannot be changed anyway and to charge the latter with Hope that invariably carries with it Disappointment].It is also a recognition of the particular milieu we inhabit today that is engined by a system that works like an incessant factory generating incessant desires that has replaced the creative capacity for rigorous self reflexivity with the toxic passivity of an obsessive consumerism.
The same treatment is at work in ‘Dancing Couple’ where the dynamic nude female figure , with a wound bursting open her chest seems to be ,rather than dancing ,actually staggering to retain her balance under a huge head load of ‘static ’-hers and his .Examining the proliferation over her head one sees a inverted acrobatic male form on the top of the pile ,the rest of him scattered all through the ‘static’ from where a ‘virtual’ -long arm stretches tightly gripping one of her legs.
Through the works we see the ’static’ go through several transformations. If in ‘Shock of a Believer’ where Johns has transferred, tongue in cheek, the universal existential shock of any betrayed faithful into the anonymous media image of the shocked face of a traumatized investor during the Indian stock market crisis in 2008.Above his hapless uncomprehending head, assuming the form of a 3D shoal of scarlet fish,the’ static’ swims in dizzying circles. Its lack of directionality is evident in the circular compositions like in ‘Ritual in a Cat’s Eye’ where it is viewed as if through the eye of a cat underlying again the ‘once removed ‘ or that distanced quality of the perception of the phenomenon of ‘static’ which makes its representation possible for the artist.
In ‘Exercise of Lies 1’ it has acquired a jewel-like quality, almost like a filigree where the mysterious blue Ground that underlies and holds it shows through the ‘statics’s growing interstices. In ‘Exercise of Lies 2’ the ‘static ‘ is located as the expressive quality of a particular utterance-a lie, within the more personal frame of a pair of lips .From free proliferations over surface, other such compositional devises are seen coming into play like the inflorescence diagram like form enclosing the ‘static’ that form the innards of a ‘Dead Flower’ .This painting is Johns’ comment on the futility of rituals that have lost their enlivening connect with their engendering ground of real faith and belief.
Through ‘Manipulated Heart’ 2008, ‘Birth of Lies’ 2012 and ‘Woman’ 2016, more changes are seen happening. ‘In Manipulated Heart’ , a kind of allusive self portrait where the face is ,however, from an unknown old European painting reproduced in a magazine , the static takes two distinct forms-one ,of the older figural mass here more stretched out ,disjointed where a sleeping God ,his head supported by a hand ,unconcerned with the petrified suffering on the face of the human above whom he floats, comes unraveled. The second is the way ‘static’ turns into myriad tiny sharp edged weapon-like religious symbols with which the heart full of irregular dark gaps like oceans on a map framing the Face is painstakingly built.
This is repeated in a mysterious and allusive manner in ‘Birth of Lies’, 2012 where a similarly constructed embryonic feminine form and an egg float in a dark silent space ,connected to one another .Is the hot flame-yellow glow on the woman’s indistinct face a presentiment of violence or is it the aftermath of dying embers? Who birthed who?
In Woman, 2016, the title is kept deliberately short and image has become more unified, terse and allusive. The ‘static’ is left incomplete and evolving .Their evocation is ambivalent :either wounds or red pockets of potential embryonic Life in the blue Ground of the ‘Mother’ form whose jagged shape evokes the presence of a multi-limbed primeval feminine Power-figure.
Against a red unevenly layered background a blue river [“as blue as poison…” quoting Johns] dotted with dry weary gaps, flows horizontally across four large square canvases. Small spiraling distributaries stemming from either side of her tired body push past the dark heavy grids of congested urban superstructures to fill huge bottles. Painted in 2007 as part of a dedicated solo series on Water, ‘Prayer of a Holy River’ was inspired by a chance hearing of a Sanskrit sloka where a Holy River sighs: ”O Where can I wash away all these burdens of sin that those who bathe in me leave behind…”
This work, that holds a special meaning for Johns in his evolution as an artist, has been included in this mini solo upon his own request.
In 2012 Johns turned to another medium, radically different from painting: Granite Sculpture, under the mentorship of Shri VK Rajan. The immediate trigger was again an emotional rupture-the death of a close peer. I remember Johns’ call to me at that time: ”I need something more than painting to absorb not just my shock and sorrow ,but my entire being. I think struggling with the hardness of stone, being compelled to minimalise and discipline form is just exactly I need now.”
What better than the hard elemental silence of Stone to discipline the annoying white noise of ‘static’?
It has been only four years now since Johns engaged himself to Stone … which amounts to nothing ,of course ,in Johns Mathew’s scale of time when it comes to his Art process.
I will just have to sit it out to see how the recurrent leitmotif in his painting as of now (that I have freely christened ‘static’ in this piece of writing) is transformed by the transformation that Granite must have set off in Johns Mathew ,the artist .Or more, Johns Mathew the vibrant living being.
Radha Gomaty
May 2016
