Vishal Tandon’s crosshatch paintings
Vishal Tandon’s crosshatch paintings are textural renderings in which lines are duplicated in one direction, and crossed in other directions termed ‘hatching’.
Even though minimalist in approach in terms of his material and the palette, his usage of bold Black & White lines impart his work a striking appeal. For him, his creation on canvas is an intriguing interplay between positive space and negative space; between emptiness and solidity that is defined by his deft strokes in ink. It’s the subject that demands the space, which he goes on filling on the canvas driven by pure instinct.
The figures he portrays in his life-sized canvases are strong, muscular, well chiseled out. These symbolize immense physical energy and vigor. At one level, bordering on homo-eroticism – a mere physical, realistic representation of the male body - the work acquires a spiritual hue.
Even though his bent of mind is spiritual, Vishal Tandon’s art neither focuses on rituals, ceremonies, and festivals that form part of religious practices nor does his art draw from paradoxes and parables that surround the phenomenon of how divinity came to be. He equates it with growth or evolution, and reaching a state of ultimate bliss, in communion with oneself, as the figures suggest.
The artist states: “My paintings always seek to articulate an inner state of mind that may be difficult to define but that we all experience. I attempt to look beyond the obvious, and bypass the filtering aspect of the conscious mind and thus allow a more engaged relationship with the inner recesses of our sub-conscious mind.”
Regarding his style, the artist mentions: “Form has always been an important aspect in my work. It’s the key to my creations, and is the core of my canvases. It is through the forms that I express myself. I am not reliant on other artistic tools for expression. I try to keep the processes uncomplicated.” He largely creates Black & White artworks, which has metamorphosed from poster-kind of artworks to figurative, and now a mix of figurative and symbolic.
This self trained artist, with no formal education or background in art, has studied tomes of texts on spirituality to get to the bottom of the subject. Curiously, the subject matter of his artwork, though it depicts divinity, is not shorn if human side of life and beyond. No surprise, the Hindu God he admires most is Lord Shiva, who the artist believes, is the most ‘human’ one – showing all virtues and follies that we possess. Lord Shiva is known to have untamed passion, which leads him to extremes in behavior, something which fascinates the artist.
The artist is fascinated by not only Lord Shiva, the third god in the Hindu triumvirate, but also by Jesus Christ. He is deeply touched by Christ's solidarity with all humanity through which the human pain of all times was suffered by him in his passion and his redeeming death. The artist is amazed by Jesus Christ’s life and how he took upon himself the suffering of all and transformed human pain and suffering from something negative into something positive, into a source of life, as it were, because they become redemptive. All these influences and impressions permeate in his work.
For the artist, spirituality and sexuality are two extremes of life between which the pendulum of life swings. Circumstances define and decide one’s course. The traversing and the journey from one extreme to another is what perhaps he tries to fathom through his forceful lines. These are not abstract art canvases done in subtle shades of Black and White. They tap into the psyche of a semi-divine creature through the artist’s third eye.
Even though he primarily has been a figurative artist, the symbols like the foliage also prominently appear in his work. He has sought refuge in nature to convey what he wants to; allegory has been there. So, instead of a lingam or a phallus, the artist will show stems or leaves. Gradually, he has opted for a subtle, symbolic representation.
