Montage of Memories

‘O angel pluck that small flower of healing! Craft a vessel to contain it!’ Rainer Maria Rilke The Fifth elegy, Duono Elegies

The artistic space unspools with stories as you enter its multidimensional territory. A concatenation of events, forms, lines and colour begin their slow, mesmeric dance. You watch with awe as images glide past the darkness like shoals of luminescent thoughts swimming in a dark sea. Paper and lines, light and colour converge to recount stories. Stories suffused in abandon and a spirit of play. The works are extraordinarily lithe and seek to revisit and recalibrate forms and techniques ideas and beliefs, honed over decades, in order to create something new and electrifying.

Vasudev ‘s recent collection of works titled “Montage of Memories,” are a series of collages. They are allegorical, rich with memory, resplendent with allusion, imbued with myth and metaphor. Done over the past five months, they are endearingly child-like in spirit and their energy is infectious. The legends and lore that have been part of his canvas for decades, the leitmotifs that feature as constant refrains from the paintings, copper work and tapestries are still the central themes. What sets these collages apart is the weaving of new stories into the old. In seeking to rework the archival in his art, he strives to retain the echoes and traces of the past, while introducing the new.

Manju Prassanan Pillai