T. Venkanna’s art transcends profane reality, to create a world of symbolic meaning.
In his works - the depiction of violence and sexual appetites, are used as tropes to
examine far-reaching concerns. The longings, pleasures and frustrations wrought by
love. The awareness that gender does not derive naturally from the biological sex of
the individual. The representation of sexual exuberance and varied ways to love - all
manifestations of potent life energy, that a society striving for control frequently seeks
to dispel.
In Lovers, same-sex individuals celebrate their connection in a subversive
manifestation of non-reproductive sexuality. Here the will to freedom is given
pleasurable rein, and sexual experiments unfurl - elaborating aspects of life that a
‘rational’ society might like to conceal.
The artist has long explored how alienation, boredom and fetishism are becoming
default states in affluent consumer society. In Pleasure and Pain, a man and woman
are together, yet apart. The only thing connecting them in their exacerbated individual
condition is a domesticated dog, from whom they seek distraction and intimacy.
While Venkanna’s ideological concerns over the years have deepened in intensity, the
mediums he employs morph with innovative fluidity. Here, for the third time in three
years, he explores the effects of the needle replacing the paint brush, producing a new
form in his oeuvre, while simultaneously blurring the boundary between art and craft.
The co-creation of “embroidered paintings” with master Zardozi artisans, disrupts a
wheel of cyclical repetition in the industry of art, in which the new, is frequently the
same. The audience is provoked to reflect as keenly on the medium, as on the aesthetic
of what they are seeing.
-Sonia Nazareth
Anthropologist/writer
