Abstract Master Achuthan's love for nature

ACHUTHAN KUDALLUR : LOVE FOR TREES?

Achuthan Kudallur one of India’s greatest abstractionists was?recognised as a major artistic innovator as well as?painting theorist. In the mid decades of the 21st?century, he was among those who advanced nonrepresentational modes of abstract art-making to lasting effect even as he dwelt on the impact and import of experience and personal memories. His stylistic evolution in this regard was intimately tied to his sense of place and the memories with which he engaged in the hamlet of Kudallur on the banks of the river Bharatpuzhya. Being a voracious reader and an illustrator of many magazines as well as a short story writer , his works were born of a wider contemplative?vision and experimental bent.

His childhood memories of the scenic Palakkad District in Kerala and his deeper understanding of Malayali rituals and stories all came together to reside on his canvasses that mirrored pools of minimal forms floating in the prism of his own colours.To look at his canvasses is to glimpse his depth of sensory poetics.

His ability to meld representation and abstraction traversed the persistence of memory even as he explored the impulse of spiritual expression.To look at Achuthan’s works is to recall the godfather of abstraction Vassily Kandinsky.While Achuthan said Indian abstraction has deeper roots we look at his work and know that?this, is what Kandinsky called the artist’s “inner necessity,” remained the guiding principle through the periodic redefinitions of his life and work.

The natural rituals in memory?and the surreal elements of life and the living?born of socio- cultural practices and folklore, informed Achuthan’s organic imagery and prompted recurrent themes of repetition?and spiritual chants. Paintings?manifest his conviction that art could transform self and society and exemplify the revitalization .

His works at the NGMA as well as ones in the auction markets are a fluid motion between painting, poetry, and?narrative compositions, as he interrogated the expressive possibilities of colour, line, and form within his understanding and love for nature.He found creative inspiration in organic processes and natural phenomena; as he pursued paths of liberation through his odyssey of abstraction.

At every turn Achuthan?responded to his love for the environment and developed new ways to probe the spiritual in art. His?paintings, illuminate the journey of an artist who would not leave behind the precedents of representation or of his own work altogether, even as he explored the transcendent potential of abstract forms in the abacus of human experience or what Malayalis call anubhavam.