Looking at India

Alexis Kersey's canvases many seem simple on the surface, but they are swarming with energy and menace.

What does it mean to be a Westerner painting in India? To make sense, with some sensitivity, of the chaotic visual landscape that India presents, to unravel a civilisation that still retains many of its millennia-old moorings, entwined with bits and pieces of religions and cultures from the world over, which is, moreover, constantly reinventing itself in line with the "modern" West?

How does he comment on all this without seeming simplistic or patronising or offensive?

Alexis Kersey, born to an English father and Australian mother who lives and paints in India, fixes on a visual middle-path that's at once contemporary and historically loaded, local and "universal".

There are three broad kinds of iconography in Kersey's works (this is true of the paintings at a recent solo at the capital's Visual Arts Gallery, and what he has shown over the past year or two).

There's the chubby-cheeks-and-rosy-lips iconography, the kind of larger than life kitschy pop style imbibed from the sign-board painters of the south who taught Kersey and who now work in his studio in Mysore, filling out the finer details.

Then, there's the Company School aspect of Kersey's art, where he picks on the visual vocabulary developed by his early compatriots to represent everyday Indian life (and which you'll still find in school textbooks and educational charts).

And lastly, Kersey picks on Indian images and motifs "" the rishi, the bindi, the jewellery "" and puts them together in a slightly wonky montage, referencing sundry underground subcultures, so that they aren't specific to the context but more like deconstructions of these very familiar elements of India, and things Indian. Given that Kersey's canvases are mostly large, the effect is quite disturbing.

"On the top" (oil on canvas, 60"x48") is as good an example of this method as any. The figure of a cherub with a mohawk hairstyle is prominent in the foreground; and he has a strip of bullets wound around his yellow-shirted torso.

He stands, triumphantly, above an Indian fort-like structure, which is represented like a stump below; in his hand is a round globe, the earth presumably, over which a mushroom cloud rises. Despite its simplistic poster-like quality and the obvious comment on nuclear India, there is something almost comically sinister about it.

As the artist says, "My paintings speak to all those not comfortable in their skin."

Coincidentally, Kersey had another set of works on show in the city at the same time "" at Peter Nagy's Nature Morte gallery.

More recent, these works point to a new maturity that is complex, layered and crowded. The basic figure "" the cherubic face "" is present in almost every canvas, almost as an alterego of the artist himself, but over it Kersey layers on a jumble of media and effects ""gilt, mirror work, wood inlay (the kind that Mysore is famous for) "" so that the paintings are "swirling with energy and menace".

"The effect," says the artist, "is of the walls in cities, especially in south India, where posters have been plastered on, one over the other, and in places people have torn them off so you have a new narrative mythology created."

So what's his take on the current hullabaloo over art? He'd rather keep away, says the artist, seeming palpably uncomfortable with the PR circus "" the parties on opening day, the media interviews "" that's become a necessary part of the openings today. He's going back to Mysore immediately after the opening, he says.

But yes, success is important. "I've been poor," he says with surprising candour, "and now there're the guys in the studio." At the rate he's gathering a reputation in the world, he'll soon not have much to worry about.