An artist in Paris

Viswanadhan made his home in France but his origins and childhood memories continue to define his work, says Kishore Singh

In the seventies, Velu Viswanadhan was as much an attraction in Paris as the Louvre for visiting writers, journalists, filmmakers and fellow artists from India.

There was, in the wild-haired painter from Kerala, a streak of bohemianism that echoed the city's experimentation with a hedonism that was not strictly materialistic "" was, perhaps, even anti-materialistic.

And though he was not the first Indian painter to make Paris his home "" he had been preceded decades before by S H Raza and Sakti Burman "" there was the dazzling simplicity with which the poverty-stricken artist had been allowed to settle into a city where the only Indians Parisians were acquainted with were either its moribund royals or the likes of the Tata family.

Viswanadhan was used to being a misfit. At home, berated by his father, he'd escaped to Chennai where, thanks to some interventions, he was able to get a scholarship to study at the Government College of Arts and Crafts.

Inspired by the principal, K C S Paniker, who would later open the doors to his students profiting from their art by painting on sarees and scarves, he became one of the earliest artists to join the commune that developed the Cholamandalam artists' colony.

Felicitated this week with a huge retrospective of his works from the sixties and seventies and the simultaneous launch of a book, Vishwanadhan (Delhi Art Gallery) by Madhu Jain, Viswanadhan is still wild-haired, still sparse, and echoes his work, saying: "In the early years, you accumulate [influences]; in later years you start shedding them. I am still shedding things from my art."

That move away from nudes (initially using them in the context of "agony" and "hunger", and later in a creative but provocative manner) to tantra and the influence of the mandala in his paintings (he came from a family of idol makers who also made architectural plans for temples and drew mandalas, though Viswanadhan himself denies any mystic influences) to later abstraction pared of anything other then "illumination", as one critic described it, or "" as he told Jain during the course of her research on the book "" "then I came to the triangle, which is the woman". To another critic, he would point out that "the triangle leads to other angles in the visual field".

Fascinated by the art of France, when he was offered the opportunity to stay in Paris to work for a forthcoming exhibition, Viswanadhan grab-bed it, and stayed on. "I had my head in the clouds...I got the Galerie de France without any recommendations." Not that it was simple.

Even though he was accepted by one of France's leading galleries, he had to fend for himself literally living out of acquaintances's homes. "Paris is the home of art," he justifies his decision still, "to be there was to know freedom."

On display at the gallery, which has acquired the bulk of his early paintings, is a series of paper works that, in 1976, were in an accident in Germany that was in an accident. The car was written off, but both Vishwanadhan and his paintings survived.

In a recent interview to art critic Jean-Marie Baron, he says it was a turning point in his life. "I then started visualising the country where I came from. And in order to find myself, I undertook the long journey, following the coast of India, collecting sand, the element that was going to form my new work. Through this elemental realisation I started discovering the dichotomy between matter and meaning of being."

But, as he explains to Jain: "I am not an abstract painter. I don't represent anything. I am not abstracting anything from an image or an object." It isn't stopping critics from pointing out to what they do see in his works, abstracted or not, but this tale is not yet told. For Viswanadhan, part two, watch this space.