The young artist's sculptures have more intellectuality than emotionality, a characteristic common to a majority of Trivandrum School sculptors, writes M. Ramachandran.
Sculpture in India, as a trend, has got its image-value back recently due to its life orientation rather than the form orientation of post-Ramkinker scene. The image-value which I speak of and argue for is the conceptual as well as the emotional potential underlying an art object. In certain periods, an intellectual armature on which the sculpture is moulded ameliorates the whole sculptural thinking practice, creating a rejuvenating idea among the contemporaneous artists as we can observe in many stages of history.
The present-day three-dimensional art objects are not self-contained in the strict sense of formal aesthetics. Knowing the opaque quality of language and the jumble of associations which a sign produces, every artist is being forced to demolish the foundation of his concept of a single dimensional communicative possibility on which his whole notion of the treatment of space and mass was built.
In contemporary India, a young sculptor's aspiration seeks a personal idiom in the formal world of sculpture which, according to our experience, always leads, him to shallow experimentalism and creation of simple surface structures. Only in the early eighties there has been an awakening in the field of Indian sculpture because of the emphasis on the humanitarian values in art in line with Neo-expressionism. A number of young sculptors of the Trivandrum School, including the late Krishnakumar, exchanged their radical views about the sculptural scene and headed for a different plastic idiom. It ultimately succeeded in the execution of a number of neoteric works of art which show certain definite characteristic like anthropomorphism, colouration of imagery, expression of physical and spiritual might of man, and subjectwise, the ordinary life situation of human beings.
N.N. Rimzon, a young sculptor from Kerala, belongs to that new generation of artists, though imagerywise his sculptures have more intellectuality than emotionality which is common to a majority of Trivandrum school sculptors.
Rimzon's sculptures, from his college days onwards, are based on certain conceptualisations and they have been getting noticed for their novelty and uniqueness. As the perception of one sign is related to the other signs which are different, the difference between two signs is the basis of sensing. To understand this symbiotic position of images or signs the multiple images forming a single sculpture will be of great significance in the current visual context.
His earlier sculptures, to which I already referred, have got some narrative characteristics for every image connotes a number of heard stories out of their realistic mould and arrangement. For instance, the sculpture named Departure (Still life) of 1985 consists of a number of images like a bed roll, an umbrella, a filled up sack, a bull's head, and a type which are brilliantly coloured. It evokes the sense of an ending of some human story.
Later, the life in London might have induced Rimzon to study the morphological opaqueness of a framed sign. Since, in the formation of a sign traces of innumerable visual as well as other kinds of experiences play a lot, every sign is capable of a free play of associations. Therefore no sign has got any transparent meaning as we have been conventionally thinking of. The Golden Boat (1988), exemplifies the obvious change that occurred in the conceptual syntax of this sculptor and how he negates the prima face connotation-value of every image.
Rimzon feels that he is in exile because he was forced to leave home. This feeling can be compared to the contemporaries. Neo-Geo artists of the West but the temperament of the artists is different. This kind of withering away from the central axis of life stables this sculptor to deconstruct the centralised vision of traditional aesthetics.
Physically speaking, in the visual sense of the term physical, this sculptor's imagery in a single work of art itself is scattered and heterogeneous but conceived as a whole. In the itineration from one part of the sculpture to its other part there are number of ‘escapings’. Inclusion of space in the itineraryof the composite form of sculpture is a detour from the power-centred visual consciousness. In other words, multiple images capable of different associations are put together to decentralize the conventionalised perceptional power. Therefore, it is unnecessary to think of a positive hermeneutic in the process of decoding the signs which originated to form the sculpture. Eroticism in these pieces of sculptures operates as a bachelor's expression of suppressed family life which can be seen as a worldwide phenomenon among a majority of young artists.
In the case of a recent sculpture named Manja Sangirthanangal (1991), the whole conceptual imagery floats in the air. Every image makes innumerable associations in our minds like the shell motif suggests the seas, or reminds one of the depiction of shell in Botticcelli's painting The Birth of Venus, or by the juxtaposition of erotic couple and the next image of a house, the shell suggests the dream form of shelter or of conception. Another image from the same sculpture, that is, the egg form reminds one of Brancusi's sculpture, The Beginning of the World and gives the echo of the form of the heads of the couple; again of conception.
In contrast to the large piece sculpture which I have already referred to, Rimzon has sculpted a, magnitudewise, small sculpture which in a gallery or wherever it is executed may not be taken note of at the first purview of the place. The sculpture, named War in Day-dream (1991) comprises a spear, the Buddha's head, and a long shedlike building. Here also the viewer is puzzled or he may be in search for the inner connection of these alien images.
Taking notice of the sculpture itself or the disparity in its element provokes the conventional sense of sculpture as well as the conventionalized sensibility of the viewer. The images in the sculptures neither stand for themselves nor for the sense of disparagement which they give, since they have not been conceptualised as the objects to be infused with meaning, nor do they play the role or installations which were in vogue a few years back. Then what is the relevance of these sculptures, particularly in the Indian context, one may ask. The sculpture has got some other function, that is, the destructuring the entire visual structures and dissemination of the imagery focused on a key image to which the society is fixed or stagnated. A change in visual structure causes a change in perception.