Artist Shibu Chand’s exhibition, Textual content/Context portrays prevailing discomforts and disappearances

Artist Shibu Chand in entrance of a portray from the Conditions collection
| Photograph Credit score: Nainu Oommen

“Artwork is the aesthetics of coexistence and battle,” reads an oblong white board positioned beside the door to Shibu Chand’s newest artwork exhibition Textual content/Context at Alliance Française de Trivandrum. On getting into, scrolls of illustrations painted on mediums starting from a stripped sky-blue lungi to a machine-made khadi fabric cling down the off-white partitions of the gallery.

Nonetheless, Shibu’s experiments together with his work had been born out of shortage reasonably than selection. Because the world was pressured right into a slumber following the pandemic, artists like Shibu had been compelled to contemplate options to the standard canvas resulting from a scarcity of artwork provides.  

“I began portray on the lungi, then I discovered it fascinating, and I moved on to different materials,” says Shibu.  

The curation accommodates 14 artworks drawn or painted throughout completely different mediums at completely different sizes which had been created by the artist inside a span of three years from 2021 to 2024. It’s Shibu’s seventh solo exhibition and his third in Thiruvananthapuram. This exhibition accommodates works from his Restricted Areas collection and Conditions collection, a few of which have been placed on show at a bunch artwork exhibition in Jehangir Museum, Mumbai. 

Recurring themes

The 4 work displayed from the Restricted Areas collection, focus on themes of discomfort and disappearance.  

Portray from the Restricted Areas collection by artist Shibu Chand
| Photograph Credit score:
Nainu Oommen

One of many works, which makes use of acrylic on a printed sheet, was impressed by an incident when Shibu noticed bisons in entrance of his home in Panayamuttam, Thiruvananthapuram. Shibu says the animals have left their pure habitat within the forest and entered the cities out of discomfort.

Shibu additionally portrays loss by way of two work in the identical collection as nicely. One of many work portrays a picture harking back to a sacrificial setting and within the different, the artist evokes a picture of the kaavus (sacred groves). “Lots of issues are disappearing from our midst. Mountains and hills are disappearing. The kaavus are disappearing,” he says. Shibu provides how the portray executed on a blue lungi derived inspiration from his analysis for his dissertation on Kalamezhuthu, the ritual of utilizing powdered color to attract ritualistic patterns on the ground.

One other portray from the Restricted Areas collection, executed on lungi evoking the picture of
| Photograph Credit score:
Nainu Oommen

Vanishing Ideas, painted on a hand-crafted Khadi fabric, depicts the symbiosis in nature together with his use of darkish shades of inexperienced. A visual intertwining of components within the portray replicates the presence of climbers and roots entangled round a tree and cautions how the lack of one can result in the destruction of that complete ecosystem.

In Sudden Area, the artist makes use of acrylic on a canvas barely smaller than the remainder of the art work within the exhibition. Shibu makes use of purple to painting a fish which is saved inside a fishing bowl, exterior which there’s an ocean which has a shade just like the fish, alluding to its removing from its pure setting.

Portray titled Sudden Areas
| Photograph Credit score:
Nainu Oommen

The artist largely makes use of scrolls to show the work. He says, “Scroll work are a part of the Indian tradition and they’re entrenched in our custom. In olden occasions, singers would go round carrying these scrolls containing tales and they’d go to locations and inform these cautionary tales meant to edify and educate.” 

Shibu says he began drawing at a younger age on a slate whereas learning in a authorities college. “Whereas I used to write down what was requested by my academics, I’d additionally draw the images on the slate by the aspect as nicely.” Nonetheless, now, Shibu, additionally an artist within the Medical Schooling Division of Kerala within the metropolis, says that his artwork tells him the place to attract subsequent. For him it comes naturally, he provides, “These are all my ideas. The language I converse is that of colors.” 

Shibu Chand’s solo exhibition Textual content/Context is at the moment taking place in Alliance Française de Trivandrum and can go on until October 30. The gallery is open from 10 am to six pm from Monday to Saturday.