Connections become clearer by going some 10º north of the equator in south India, to a moment when the artist was a boy.
Palakkad is a district in Kerala that borders Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu to the east, and the Silent Valley biosphere to the north. In the 1970s and 1980s, on an ancestral property located near Marutharode Panchayat in Palakkad, there was a carpentry workshop that produced simple wooden furniture. It was Nityan’s grandfather’s. Nearby on the same grounds, by a pond teeming with fish was the family house fronted by a vivid blue portico under the eaves. It was a deliciously picturesque place. Mango, teak, and cashew nut trees sprung tall out of laterite earth. Paddy fields, beyond the raised rim of the pond sprawled in a great rectangle to the north.
During his summer holidays, Nityan, a young Calicut native gladly visited his grandparents at this house. The disciplinarian order of school life seemed remote during these sylvan months. But under his grandfather’s instruction he would also count the harvest of mangoes and coconuts, wash the car, and when he was old enough drink deep of his grandfather’s secrets of how to build.
In time, the boy went to college where he failed at physics miserably, perhaps because his old ardour for building and furniture held fast. That was a good thing. It now stories what he draws and paints: derelict facades, defunct ships, old people, wobbly chairs. It also fuels that great part of his pictures in which joining disconnected bits of memories is mostly about getting impossible geometries to work.
~
Nityan’s pictures tunnel relentlessly through his family’s association with now-impoverished Kerala clans, an era of intellectuals whose work may well be forgotten, radicalized politics gone soft, and the fiery discourse of Naxalite activism that once spurred an entire generation of youth in the 1950s and 1960s. A frank admiration for American author Raymond Carver, particularly how his dirty realism achieves, as Carver might have said of good fiction, “a bringing of news from one world to another”, exerts on the artist an equal spell.
The juice that animates this archive comes from colour taking a backseat. The works’ most vivid instances - dark coral red, azure blue, and brilliant moss green - are drained of their obvious intensities. Looking as if sun-bleached or milk-distilled, or sometimes dusted with dark talcum powder, they reveal, in this respect, that Nityan might well be a closet Brutalist. He focuses on drawing to the surface material and emotive textures of motifs. Colour functions logically. A burst of colour has to do with the presence of a moment or a person in the image that justifies its inclusion. It could be a figure’s pulsing red jumper, a mountain’s dappled green, a building’s blue facade, the burnt earth beneath a figure’s feet, the mottled grey skin of an ageing man. It functions like a present but unorthodox keystone that might not centre an image yet allows its bits and bobs to rise and interlock.
~
Before everything is the crux. Whatever the size of the work, Nityan invariably begins with a simple portrait, a mode that echoes his study of Francis Bacon; the British artist frequently chose his friends, lovers, and peers to be the lone subjects of his works. Favouring a blocky portrait orientation, he draws a sizeable figure at the centre of the picture plane. This is usually someone central to the cultural biographies that fascinate him. The point of departure could be anyone from his father and his father’s intellectual circle to erstwhile Naxal frontrunners such as K. Venu, Kunnikkal Narayanan, and Mandakini a.k.a. Ma, Nandanar the Malayali fantasist of children’s stories who also wrote novels about life in the Indian army, and Carver’s wife, the poet Tess Gallagher.
Semi-fictional personae resulting from these citations are then paired with precisely those phenomena that modern redevelopment replaces or consciousness neglects: furniture, buildings, a beloved storybook character, Kerala’s horticultural splendour, and love. Around the human fulcrum, it is they that make the picture’s armature. This may include one-time cameos such as red buses on a leash, a framed painting on a wall behind a seated figure, or a jewel-red pomegranate on a table. But some special imagery repeats erratically across Nityan’s visual lexicon. Lifetime seats are blocked for leitmotifs of ruined piers, large and small fish, blue tabletops, boats, tatty balustrades, old men, and the folkloric Keralan shape-shifter known as Odiyan. Notably, few of these secondary images have a chiselled individuality. They are more likely to abut one another and perch precariously riveted to each other’s edges, such as to obscure where one sub-plot begins and ends.
~
Let it be said, Nityan’s pictures are not about salvaging fragments threatened by invisibility into the hard, observable things, what Nabokov ironically called ‘transparent’ in his novel. They are notes on a kind of thing theory, learned in Palakkad, tweaked by his own response to the writer. Call them an attempt to build the unbuildable, not least because what was once well built, and loved, is now near gone. Some things will remain half-obscured. Some will remain tectonically unsound. In accord with this unfair distribution of heft in things, there exist subtle shifts in the pictures’ surface tones, between limpid, vitreous, subfusc, and opaque. That Nityan works iteratively also explains this effect. Inked images of clear, outlines, typically containing either stippling or a fine mohair-like fill, are combined with films of watercolour laid one atop the other, with repeats. The resulting variation in tone contributes to the work’s overall visual paradigm—that of detail combined with change. So, more than complete stories the pictures are closer to construction sites. Their look of work in progress, their open-ended quality, is what keeps the pictures honest. It balances the artist’s rather crackpot attempt to construct something whole out of bits and pieces that never belonged to each other, and might never do, except here. "
~
Prajna Desai for "Transparent Things, exhibition at Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai, April-June 2015
Nityan Unnikrishnan (b.1976, India)
Ants, 2010
Sookoon Ang
—Exorcise Me (IV)
2013Sookoon Ang
—Exorcise Me (V)
2013Sookoon Ang
—Exorcise Me (IX)
2013Sookoon Ang
—Exorcise Me
2013Rina Banerjee
—With breath Taking Consumption Her Commerce Ate While She Was Being Eaten
2008Atul Bhalla
—Submerged Again
2005Hansen Briele
—Untitled, Australia
2007Sheba Chhachhi
—Neelkanth: Poison/Nectar
2000-2008Genevieve Chua
—Swivel #7, Turnout
2014Genevieve Chua
—Swivel #5, Bone Mineral
2014Jigger Cruz
—Trinitarian Formula: Great Corners Through the Eyes of the Moths
2015Atul Dodiya
—Krishna Swallowing Forest Fire
2010Heri Dono
—The Monkey Astronaut
2013Heri Dono
—The Skeleton Angel
2008Vibha Galhotra
—- + & - (From series- Utopia of difference)
2012Vibha Galhotra
—Works in Progress
2008Chitra Ganesh
—Mechanical Girl
2010Chitra Ganesh
—The Camera
2010Chitra Ganesh
—The Matahari
2011Sakshi Gupta
—Untitled
2009Shilpa Gupta
—Untitled (Heat book)
2009Shilpa Gupta
—I Keep Falling At You
2010Subodh Gupta
—Three Rounds
2010Mit Jai Inn
—Untitled (scroll)
2014Geraldine Javier
—Hysteria
2011Winner Jumalon
—Watchmen I
2016Winner Jumalon
—Pomegranates II
2016Ranbir Kaleka
—Cul-de-Sac in Taxila
2010Ranbir Kaleka
—Man with Cockerel II
2004Ranbir Kaleka
—18 Allegories of the Self
2011Jitish Kallat
—Afterwards (Versions of a Disappearing Act)
2011Jitish Kallat
—Baggage Claim
2010Jitish Kallat
—The Cry Of Gland
2010Jitish Kallat
—Untitled (Stations of Pause)
2011Bharti Kher
—Make Up (as you go along)
2010Anant Kumar Mishra
—When The Gods Were Born 3
2010Anant Kumar Mishra
—When The Gods Were Born 2
2010Julius Macwan
—Time Bomb/ The Death of Art
2011I Nyoman Masriadi
—Great Daddy
2014Thomas Navin
—Continium Transfunctioner vol.8
2012Yudi Noor
—Moses
2010Yudi Noor
—Take Time to Think
2009Yudi Noor
—Breaking the Water Picture
2010Donna Ong
—In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
2010Jagannath Panda
—The Elusive Theatre
2011Aditya Pande
—Portrait for a Landscape
2011Ruben Pang
—Auto Pilot
2014Ruben Pang
—Ophelia
2014Ruben Pang
—Light and Divine Winds
2016Ruben Pang
—Graduation Night (Triptych)
2015Iranna Pooja
—The Core
2012J. Ariadhitya Pramuhendra
—Death of the Robe
2011J. Ariadhitya Pramuhendra
—Vampire
2013Gatot Pujiarto
—Dirty Mind / Otak Porno
2008Gatot Pujiarto
—Unstoppable / Tak Terbendung
2012Tazeen Qayyum
—It’s Complicated #1, #5, #9
2010Rajesh Ram
—Strength Lies Only in Unity
2010Rajesh Ram
—Black Girl
2009Rashid Rana
—Desperately Seeking Paradise II
2011Raqs Media Collective
—Revoltage
2010Ravinder Reddy
—Woman
2010Reena Saini Kallat
—Synonym (man)
2007-2009Reena Saini Kallat
—Falling Fables-2
2010Reena Saini Kallat
—Colour Curtain (between shores and the sea)
2009Sudarshan Shetty
—Untitled
2010Sudarshan Shetty
—Untitled
2010Manit Sriwanichpoom
—Pink Men vs. Pink Buddha
2007L.N Tallur
—Eraser Pro
2011Nguyen Thai Tuan
—Black Painting No. 40 (1955)
2008Nguyen Thai Tuan
—Black Painting No. 58
2008Nguyen Thai Tuan
—Black Painting No. 109
2014Thukral & Tagra
—Kingdom Come IV
2011Thukral & Tagra
—Science, Mystery and Magic II (superman)
2011Nityan Unnikrishnan
—Give Me Two Minutes Please
2010Ronald Ventura
—Carne Carnivale
2014Asim Waqif
—RE-COLLECTION
2012Entang Wiharso
—Under Family Portrait
2012Entang Wiharso
—The Last Weakness (Comic Book Series)
2011Entang Wiharso
—No Target (Comic Book Series)
2010Entang Wiharso
—Undermind
2012Robert Zhao Renhui
—Eskimo Wolf Trap Often Quoted in Sermons
2013
Eduardo Basualdo
—Untitled (after Fontana)
2012Eduardo Basualdo
—Untitled (2012)
2012Chitra Ganesh
—Mechanical Girl
2010Chitra Ganesh
—The Camera
2010Isabelle Grobler
—The Cannibal's Congress: father tongue
2015Isabelle Grobler
—the cannibal’s congress: mother tongue
2015Isabelle Grobler
—the cannibal's congress: founding ideology
2015Carlos Huffmann
—Untitled
2006-2013Jitish Kallat
—Afterwards (Versions of a Disappearing Act)
2011Laura Lima
—Untitled
2014Moris (Israel Meza Moreno)
—Sin Titulo (pegamento)
2016Lavar Munroe
—Untitled
2014Bernardo Ortiz
—Sin Titulo
2014Bernardo Ortiz
—Sin Titulo
2014Aditya Pande
—Portrait for a Landscape
2011Pavel Pepperstein
—Untitled
2011Nicolas Robbio
—Untitled
2014Rodrigo Torres
—Contagalo
2011Rodrigo Torres
—Aster
2011Rodrigo Torres
—Uns Trocodos
2011Yi-Hsing Tzeng
—9 Works: My Dear Deng, Xiaoping | My Dear Ronald Reagan | My Dear Bill Clinton | My Dear George W. Bush | My Dear George Bush | My Dear Sunny Side Up Chiang, Kai-shek | My Dear President #4 | My Dear Ma, Ying-jeou | My Dear Barack Obama |
2010 - 2011Nityan Unnikrishnan
—Give Me Two Minutes Please
2010Liu Xiaodong
—Green pub 6
2013Haegue Yang
—Over the Waves and Trails – Trustworthy #87- #104
2011