Achuthan Kudallur’s life was a cosmic dance with art in all its magnificence and ambiguity

Canvases in red, or beyond the definition of red, have always been a part of Kudallur’s paintings

Achuthan Kudallur has now travelled beyond the abstractions of his canvases, filled with signs and symbols encoded in colour.

Canvases in red, or beyond the definition of red, have been a part of Kudallur’s paintings ever since I can recall. It explains why Gita Hudson, who has been documenting the works of South Indian artists, has produced a video of Kudallur’s work, ‘Red Symphony’. As the camera pans over the paintings that were exhibited at the Durbar Hall Art Gallery in Kochi, there are hypnotic drumbeats of Kerala’s ritualistic performers marking the pulse of life and death.

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Against the red of his abstract creations, you often get tiny streaks of white. They appear like pulsars, pin-points of light that he has instinctively placed at random to create a sense of expanding space. At other times, Kudallur fragments his canvas with black strokes. Like black holes that devour the light, or create them anew, they reflect the concerns of the tantric rituals enacted in Kerala temples when patterns in colour placed on the floor are stamped out by the feet of performers.

As his name suggests, the artist belongs to Kudallur, a town in the Pattambi Taluk of Palakkad that borders one of the most majestic of Kerala’s rivers, the Bharathapuzha. The ebb and flow of these rivers haunt those who have lived by their banks.

“I would like my paintings to flow from my hands like a child playing with colours in a stream of water,” he had once confessed. Quite apart from the iconic reds, with their intimations of darkness, Kudallur also painted abstractions loaded with a palette of the darting blues of a kingfisher, the yellows of the flowering amaltas and palm frond greens that decorate the offerings made at the harvest time of Vishu. In retrospect, they appear to celebrate memories of a carefree childhood. He had been trained to be a civil engineer, maybe even a writer, as he once admitted. When he was introduced to the Government College of Art in Chennai, and a group of art lovers who started the Madras Art Club, he discovered his vocation.

In time, he received several honours and particularly enjoyed the camaraderie of the art camps in different parts of the country. He was invited to the 7th Art Triennale in New Delhi in 1991, as well as the Asian Art Show in Fukuoka, Japan.