Shankar
has been watching and nurturing his trees, and growing with
them for quite a number of years now. It is his single-minded
devotion to trees - his concentration on trees - that has
contributed to the development/enrichment of his observation.
The simpler emotionality of his earlier works, with occasional
descents even into the pathetic fallacy, has now given way
to a denser reading of trees in formal-spatial terms. His
formal readings of treescapes are often products of locations
- of the way he positions himself as artist and chooses his
point of observation so that a tree tends to lose parts of
its being, or its wholeness even, to manifest itself in segmented/splintered
elements charged with a precarious lightness of being verging
on flight, or drifting into spaces that they create out of
their drift, the swirling, stretching, organic, fleshly tendrils
embodying a desperate dynamism. In the tendrils branching
out into space and reaching out, there is an element of emancipation,
of a life rising out of the tree but achieving independence
- and even the insecurity - and tension of a battleground.
Architectural
forms and constructions - man-made resistances to nature -
appears in Shankar's works, not as background or contrast
to the treescapes, but as more formally determined points
of reference, as in the work where a wall on the right and
a flat on the left foreground leave a fissure between, from
where an entry of light illuminates the tree form moving in
from ambient space into the frame from the right. Shankar,
in his new works, moves away from lyricism of tree forms turning
into dancing or swinging human forms to the more dramatic
encounters between tree forms set loose in air and the space,
often defined in masses, colors or densities.
Shankar
works on the skyscapes too, making them with spots, smears,
glows, flashes, or beams hitting them from outside the frame
- often from the viewer's end, i.e. frontally - so that the
trees rising into the skyscapes or registering themselves
on a landscape assert their identities in a space that is
beyond nature as real. It is with this re-location of the
tree in a space that is defined by the viewer in his reading
of the tree as it defines itself in the new context of illumination
and formal dynamics and fields of confrontation that Shankar
carries his discourse on trees beyond the environmental into
a man-tree drama at a more emotionally complex level, where
cares and thrills, discoveries and recognitions, insights
and flights of vision intermingle to invest the tree with
a tenser life. |
