Viart Gallery, New Delhi, on January 30, 2009 presented Murali Cheeroth’s solo exhibition titled Unmarked. Lina Vincent Sunish talks to this visual artist to understand his journey through art.

Murali Cheeroth’s muse is the city - with its porous borders, human hierarchies, and totems of progress rearing above the chaos and order. Here every third person is an ‘outsider’ and each individual claims a part of the urban experience. For several years now the city has been at the centre of his thoughts, vis a vis his pictorial language and conceptual theories, bringing into focus his journey and stay as a migrant through several cities. This chosen displacement rather than confusing his vision has instead sharpened it so that each segment of urban life appears in his paintings as through a prism - split into its various components, magnified or shrunk – them, us, now, then, it, he, here there, self, other? He deftly juggles with and interprets the various layers of information, blending the public with personal, and the general with experiential all tied together with visual clarity. In his own words “..my working process is a kind of extraction system, that draws  on tiny concerns about uber urbanization, frenzied globalization and the visual/virtual stimulation therein, and folds and unfolds them into another reality to simplify their characteristics and relationships in order to build a new visual experience that is clear and vivid.”1  

Murali’s current works enclose a kind of futuristic space; an urban scenario looked at through the haze of neon lights and fast-forwarded activity. He uses a deliberate juxtapositioning of symbols and metaphors to construct simultaneous narratives seemingly divergent in subject but bound together pictorially. The symbols (accumulated and retrieved from sensory experiences and mass media) range from specific icons and structures in a cityscape that stand for technology, industry and globalization, to certain human characters, both from history and the present that signify emotions and ideals, to rare signs of self that attempt to reconcile his own history with the complexities of present multiple realities. More often than not the artist seems like a spectator to his own works, looking at everything objectively. Though violence (of various types) figures strongly in his works he transcends it with an almost playful misrepresentation of context and the inclusion of images of optimism. Even harsh subject matter in his works is presented so smoothly as to be matter of fact or absurd, carrying through his objective of creating the Mise-en-scene (French theatrical term for ‘whatever is put in the scene’), the unreal space framed by his composition that does not require explaining. His experience with theatre has allowed him to appropriate dramatic tools like these to extend his concerns. One of his paintings for example shows an anonymous figure in army camouflage sharply cropped to zoom into the heavy rifle at his hip, and yet the scene he is placed in is one of calm festivity, accentuated by a leaping silhouette on the right, while the armed figure itself unthreateningly fiddles with a mobile phone (or is he about to trigger an explosion…?). A recent work depicts a streetlight in the centre of a busy composition, standing for the forced authority it has on the movements of the people around it. It hints at an underlying violence that could erupt if for some reason the signals did not function drawing reference perhaps to Richard Sennett’s theory of how an excessively ordered community freezes adults into rigid attitudes and can generate patterns of behavior that are violence prone. 2To the left in the background are a series of figures in movement, holding and throwing a star in sequence, referring to the artists own changing experiential situation, and to the right a silhouetted image of an explosion. In the forefront, a figure with a strong arm made up of floral motifs completes the scene. Murali consciously seeks literary matter and urban theories that can extend and substantiate his own views and help to unravel the intricacies in his work. Richard Sennet is one of the scholars whose works on historic and contemporary city structures, individuals and families in urban contexts, authority and capitalism he has studied for motivation to grasp further complexities thrown up by his urban experience. He does not desire to be straightforward; his paintings have several undercurrents of emotion and experience that are submerged in life, sometimes beyond immediate understanding. “You can make a statement (about a painting) but it is not valid in individual perception, that depends on the individual experiential condition”, he says, reiterating that his work is about myriad issues and ideas.

To delve a little deeper into Murali’s Cheeroth’s history takes us back to the mid 80’s in Kerala, when a period of intellectual and cultural exchange pushed theatre and film making among other fields to new creative frontiers. The Little Magazine movement that had already acted as a catalyst for political and literary activity for two decades continued its strong presence.  It was a rich time for Murali, then pursuing a diploma in the College of Fine Art in the considerably cosmopolitan Trissur. He was particularly involved in theatre, with political leftist ideals playing a prominent role in the process, this recurring as a subtle influence in his art practice.

The first act of displacement, which was later to play a huge part in his art making, happened when he went to Santiniketan in 1986. Attracted very much by the liberal possibilities that printmaking offered, and thrilled by the newness of it (there was no printmaking at that time in course at Trissur), he decided to pursue printmaking. Through his degree and masters at Vishwabharathi University he explored different techniques and mediums – lithography, etching, screen printing, engraving. Spurred on by a chance exhibition of large prints, he also experimented with large sizes, something painstakingly laborious given the antiquated machinery available. He realized along the way that he had to find it within himself to widen and enhance his creative repertoire rather than depend on outside help. With printmaking not at the same standing as either painting or sculpture, young artists like him had only the one off international biennale, or state printmaking shows to show their work at, not the best and most lucrative platform. After a short period of making ends meet working with a theatre group in Kolkata, a decision not to waste his fine art education took over, and he once more moved cities – this time to Bhopal where making large prints was a reality. More than ten years after he left Kerala, it was from here that he received a printmaking scholarship from Kanoria, Ahmedabad, where after a successful period of experimentation, was absorbed into the faculty where he enjoyed leading students in their artistic pursuits. This was an important phase in his creative growth, here he also visualized and directed several plays. Moving to painting was part of a natural progression to carry on his work without the easy access to printmaking machinery. Without detracting from his love for printmaking, Murali says that working without the constraints of arduous technique released pent up creative vigor like an explosion of sorts in his paintings. He worked in Ahmedabad and Chennai before ultimately settling down in Bangalore.

UGFI, Pine Wood Apartments, Sultan Palya, Bangalore is the spot where the city begins for Murali, right at his studio. The space is marked with his thought and practice, paintings at different stages of completion rest against the walls. Looked at closely, each canvas has a surface worked in a combination of sharp detailed clarity and blurred portions, geometric structures alternating with soft forms. The fine surface treatment is a legacy of his printmaking training. Heightened colours, multiple scales, shadow and silhouette and daring space divisions create a visual tension, a visible equivalent of the concept of ‘city’ that he developed after much thought and exploration. His paintings inhabit an ambiguous nighttime, when lights make you see a morphed version of the world.  He recreates the ‘real’ world with an aesthetic manufactured precisely for the purpose. The colours are directly borrowed from their neon counterparts, pictured as seen in fast motion, but stretched out in time like in slow film. Anyone unwilling to enter into and interpret the painted space with all its confusing absurdities is still ensured of a thrill from the surface.

In contrast to his busy paintings, Murali’s video films are minimal and pithy, and also figure a lot more of ‘self’ in terms of his own persona. For him video films are an alternative media to express parts of his philosophy that would be lost in a one dimensional static surface. They often bring to mind absurd theatre, using horror tinged with comedy, word play and clichés, and the character(s) caught in awkward and sometimes meaningless actions, repeating terms like a litany. Like the exaggerated physical and psychological contortions of a body forced to school its movements and behavior under the forced gaze of a CCTV, ever present like the big brother (Unmarked). Or the absurd dialogue between a body and its alter ego, repeatedly playing and punning with a ‘question’ for which there is seemingly no answer, but a further question (Trans-ver-sal).