A.P. Santhanaraj

A.P. Santhanaraj (b.1932, Thiruvannamalai) Directors StatementProfessor Santhanaraj is considered by many in South India to be the most influential artist of the second wave that followed K.C.S. Panniker and S. Dhanapal out of the Madras College of Arts and Craft. Santhanaraj quickly forged an artistic style of his own dedicated to ascertaining the various complexities of pictorial space through abstract engagement with figurative subject matter. From student days, Santhanaraj would always approach a canvas with passion, aggression and enthusiasm. Students even now remember how magical colour, line and form would flow from him whatever the emotional stimulus. Crucial to his work from the start was his love of line: its meandering through pictorial space, defining and dividing in its wake, shaping and destroying form, aiding and inhibiting light and colour. His spontaneous free line inspired his colour palette and also archetypes to emerge, especially the buxom female heroine. She would appear from his subconscious through the jagged lines and the spatial areas they displaced along the way.Today, at the age of 74, Santhanaraj experiments further with the concept of abstraction first and, from this process, the emergence of unconscious figuration. His paintings today begin with the placement of random pieces of paper on the canvas. These are moved around the pictorial space whilst the canvas itself is intermittently rotated and inspected from all angles. The methodology reveals symmetry with Jackson Pollock, a painter who in his abstraction would circle the canvas on the floor like a panther meeting its prey. Santhanaraj has many similarities with Pollock, however the divergence comes when harmony is found –when the strewn accidental shapes and pictorial space are in sync and provoke a first reductive line from the artist. Where Pollock would halt at his completion, Santhanaraj begins ‘operating on the pictorial space’ reacting all the time to the abstract shapes at the centre of his memory of the canvas. He mysteriously links and disconnects lines from each other until a hand or torso emerges lending a vision for the rest of the painting. He purposefully detaches himself from objects of the outside world (he says that these could be corruptive to the process) drawing instead from the visual well within. Colour is still second to line and when it arrives it is far-fetched, cheery and only sometimes related to the arising shapes. Interestingly, the jagged shapes and lines combined with the fragmented colour makes for a flatness similar to an ancient Indian wall painting where the rock face (its lines, crevices and irregular formations) has an effect on the painting created upon it. Though he would maintain that he has moved far from the art of his ancestors in his life’s struggle to produce figuration from the most abstract of processes, in so doing he has created imagery fascinatingly akin to the idyllic world depicted by Indian artists thousands of years ago.Return to gallery……..