Artist Balaji Ponna’s exhibition — When Nothing Goes Right, Go Left — showcases artworks that respond to the social and cultural realities of the times we live in. By Uma Nair
Artist Balaji Ponna doesn’t escape from reality, rather he engages with what he sees and experiences around him. His exhibition — When Nothing Goes Right, Go Left — has a satirical slant about it and Balaji, the graphic genius, creates a series of watercolour on canvas that must go down in art history as a lesson in the lineage of exploring mixed media like soot, indigo and pastels. The street, the landscape and the expression of everyday realities become a part of his canvas, layer upon layer.
Feeding off books and literature
Political sub-texts and mainstream politics converge in his works. He is skilled in the art of accommodation and links painted text-phrases with images. In fact the text frames the meaning and the subtext of the visual images. The brevity and simplicity of the imagery are key in this regard.
A voracious reader, his work is inspired by two classical German philosophers, Athur Schopaneur and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietsche. The far reaches of their writing that embrace truth, morality, language, aesthetics, cultural theory, history, nihilism, power, consciousness and the meaning of existence become milestones in the evolution of Balaji’s own intellectual history.
Philosophy then becomes the bedrock on which his works evolve; knowing that his quietude is fashioned by India’s great thinkers, J Krishnamurti and Ramana Maharshi, Srirangam Srinivas (Sri Sri) and chalam from Telugu writers.
Balaji explains, “This series of works follows my continuing engagement with what may be called ‘human-scapes’. It is also the outcome of my concerns and comments about existing society. It is in many ways the mirror of our dystopian times. When hatred and treachery become a norm, the hope for a better life fades into oblivion.”
His works engage with everyday idioms that are as pointed as they are poetic and fantastic. The sooty grey skies in his landscapes sometimes have horses, sometimes just remnants of human habitation and at other times a few humans as miniature models as in The World Is Flat. Balaji reimagines a motif common to the history of both individual and collective history. The suggestions of humans, the tiny sculpted figures of the horses, the skulls, meant to serve as a means of either structural or metaphorical moorings, all have a certain structure and purpose.
Spectacle of summaries
For his part, Balaji stages an intellectual aesthete’s intervention, liberating the landscape from traditional artifice. In his two skull-related works, he talks about the architects of time who want to convey a far more conservative/honest set of values.
Simultaneously historic and humanoid, each landscape is unique, with an individualised textural terrain. He uses soot for ornamentation, and pastels for a dulcet patination. Balaji’s embellishments take a great deal of inspiration from aerial views that he uses as his backdrop. The horizontal and vertical planes that coalesce allude to earth songs murmuring through the planes of differential plates. Belonging to no one time or place, Balaji’s collective as well as single figures are invariably stately, resilient and self-possessed. They announce their authority and autonomy even though they are so miniscule. They bring us a universe of new ideas and fresh perspectives.
Blending realism and surrealism
What is clearly visible in Balaji’s work is a strong narrative approach along a quasi-surreal plane, with imagery formulating a language that seeks to create a satirical yet sensitive commentary on the lifestyles, dogmas and discourses we are faced with in everyday living. Tranquility and tension both combine in the canvas in Branches for Birds…Sculptures for Streets. The painting is a symbolic representation of objects with a strong narrative; the mention of the birds is a lamentation as well as a satirical comment on urban history.
“What I put across and suggest for all of us is to pick up those simple commonsensical markers which can lead us somewhere better. Like the shadow that follows even a visually impaired person, however, oblivious he is of that fact. The effects of our inhuman and unconcerned deeds would follow us everywhere to remind us of our impending doom,” says Balaji.
This show constitutes one of Balaji’s most important and remarkable bodies of work to date, the culmination of sustained artistic experimentation and rigorous research into the relationship between power, culture and the dynamics of existence.