Shadow sculptures

comes to grips with the art of the invisible.

Figure these out:
1. Two holes in a wall, 5/8th of an inch apart.
2. A severed head wrapped up in a rag and suspended from a hook on the wall.
3. A body emerging from a wall.

A Balasubramaniam's show in Delhi's Talwar Gallery after an eight-year hiatus from the capital is an intellectual exercise. The sculptor (for most part) is engaged in a discussion of shadows and spaces, in the seeing and the unseeing, in evaluating the truth as defined by those who seek spirituality or study science.

But leave that aside for the moment, to get back to what you make of the artist's work:

1. The holes are made by someone trying to hang a picture and not getting it right?

2. The Nithari murderer trying to hide evidence...

3. How did it get there in the first place, and is it coming out or sinking in?

So it's hardly surprising that Balasubramaniam says his works "are never answers, they're questions, and the answers are in the questions". Balasubramaniam is that rare contemporary artist who asks why "you need to be politically loaded". Scathing about critics' need to slot artists into some category "" "in the West, they want you to use gobar, or turmeric, to qualify as the exotic Indian; in India, to be positioned as a Cubist, or a minimalist, to be slotted into a convenient paradigm" "" he has found his space in void, in, literally, nothing.

His earlier works, he explains, were about traces "" about thumb prints and footprints and the residue of fire "" that have since been shaped by an "invisible existence". "When our senses are so limited, how can we understand the invisible?" he asks metaphorically. His eye, trained to see shadows, crafts sculptures skillfully out of those emptinesses that he's learnt to look at "with more awareness".

In truth, you might well agree when he asks about the space that is occupied by, for instance, the shadow of an open carton, or electricity. That it exists is apparent. But how does it occupy space "" that's where science must give way to the artist's surreal imagination. And that's why Balasubramaniam will not hesitate to pour liquid fibreglass over himself should he need to sculpt a torso, or a hand, a head or even the whole body. "It is claustrophobic," he agrees, "you want to break free of the confines "" but you can also feel the exact space you occupy, something you will never realise till you feel your body wanting to break away from that confinement."

Bangalore-based Balasubramaniam's works have travelled the globe "" UK, Austria, France, the US, Spain, Singapore "" taking the tensions of his voids and negative spaces to viewers who, each one of them, view these differently.

But, still, in case you wish to figure out what the artist has attempted, here are Balasubramaniam's responses:

1. "Breath", for that's how he breathes with his body in a fibreglass cast.

2. "Gravity", another of Balasubramaniam's "invisible" forces "" but does science have the whole truth?

3. "In, but out", where the shadows define the mass of the body but because "the eye cannot tell concave from convex therefore, through the flawed seeing, you cannot tell if the body in going in or coming out".

Time to brush away from the cobwebs in your mind "" this is the new art.