Art critic S.V. Vasudev coined the term ‘Madras Metaphor’ in his article about the artists of the Madras Movement when a group showed in Bombay in 1991. All of art at some level is metaphorical, the image always resting its case in allusions and representations. For, isn’t art what we perceive of it?
Dhanraj Bhagat from Delhi and P.V Janakiram in the South are credited with the major development of contemporary frontal sculptures. Anila Jacob and Kanayi Kunhiraman from Kerala did front relief sculptures. V. Sthapathy and Janakiram used wire and their work was very figurative. In this milieu, nurturing a 25-year correspondence with British sculptor Sir Anthony Caro known for assemblage, S. Nandagopal evolved his frontal narratives. “I was attracted to the gopuram as an abstract shape. There are figures in it you cannot see a mile away. This was a wonderful idea; an abstract shape and figures that are seen when you reach close.” I recall Monet’s paintings of water lilies filling up chambers of the Art Institute — pinks, greens and blues confusing in close-up, the lilies popping up only as we moved away. S. Nandagopal’s journey in sculpting with metal concerns the opposite movement in seeing.
There were no big-scale sculptures till 400 years after Buddha, beginning only in Gandhara when the Greeks came to India, notes Nandagopal. The only visual artist to receive a Homi Bhabha Fellowship (1980), Nandagopal’s journey with large-scale sculptures started in 1995 with the 20-foot high Tree in stainless steel for Priyadarshini Park on Malabar Hill in Mumbai. The 15-foot-tall Garuda was installed at the TCI headquarters in Gurgaon in 1999. Memories of a Hero Stone , a man holding up a roaring tiger, was at one point the largest welded work in copper and brass in India. In 2000, Nandagopal made the work Bhishma . For Hyatt, Chennai, Rajeev Sethi commissioned Nandagopal for Bee Keeper which is 22 feet high and 15 feet wide. The plinth, a tree with a beehive pattern, is by Suresh Kumar.
From drawing to enlargement by Xerox, cutting templates on board to shaping metal with large scissors, annealing and welding, the sculptor’s job is tedious. Nandagopal’s sculptures were often quite wide and tall. He devised a strategy to coat the sculpture with a positive coil dipped in silver cyanide, the sculpture connected to the negative pole. Then with volcanic sand and ritha (soap nut) they rubbed it down till it was milky white.
Nandagopal disavows any religious connection with iconography, using these as springboards. In places where we make associations with a certain mythological figure’s elements, he removes them. For each of us rushing to make meanings from known symbols, he quietly pulls us back to look at the form to ask where the images came from. As filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky said, “We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it’s a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it.”
The shrouded metal sculpture at Nandagopal’s studio waits to be revealed. It has a familiar figure at the centre from Arjuna’s Penance, one leg folded, hands raised in prayer. Around the figure, fish, boar, birds and symbols play. “When the sculpture was completed and a silver patina was applied I started to think of a suitable title. I suddenly remembered Justice Ananthanarayanan’s wonderful title The Silver Pilgrimage. It is about a young prince’s journey through life,” he says. When I ask him if anyone has commissioned this work, he says wistfully, “Ray made so many sacrifices to complete his first film Pather Panchali . The least we can do is invest in what we believe.”
When I comment that he is passionate about his work, he remarks, “Which artist is not?” A broken terracotta mould lies on the floor of his home. It is a reminder that the contemporary Indian artist has broken from the mould of the traditional artist, embracing individuality and creating personality.
(Chennai Canvas links art to design and culture through an inside look at the city)
