Of lines and light: Rm Palaniappan’s Finite and Infinite

Rm Palaniappan’s ongoing exhibition Finite and Infinite at Delhi’s Dhan Mill is an exploration of visual aesthetics in slow motion

At Dhan Mill, Nature Morte’s unveiling of Rm Palaniappan’s Finite and Infinite is an odyssey of the poetry of light and lines against his sparse abstract renditions that echo an artistic practice born of a domain immersed in abstraction. Palaniappan who was former Secretary Lalit Kala Akademi was an astute administrator and is a greatly distinguished practitioner of art in Tamil Nadu. His most epic exhibition as administrator to date at LKA was the National Art Exhibition of 2011, held after 17 years in Chennai.

From his newest works that use acrylic on canvas in a variety of sizes to the beauty of tangled and meandering lines that embrace multiple angles, his works wrap around our senses. There is a beauty of aerobic enchantment amidst numbers and grainy gravitas.

Palaniappan once stated: “ The only true reality lies in the interaction between the physical and the psychological. I am to capture this movement in my work.”

The artist’s trajectory is seen in lithe contours that change colours in progression. Curator and director, Peter Nagy, says, Palaniappan’s works ‘ suggest life’s journey within aerial military cartographies that add geographical perspective.’

Palaniappan says: “Only someone flying in space can make a three-dimensional drawing and stretch it to infinity, thus expressing complete human freedom.” Critic and author Sadanand Menon describes it as “a neutral, non-anthropomorphic space carrying images of unnameable places and their visual representations, whether terrestrial or planetary or astronomical. It is a kind of experimental geography and the possibility of proposing radical landscapes.”

Palaniappan’s love for sciences, mathematics and astronomy find their way into a lifelong art practice that reveals his fascination with the dynamics of the flying machine. This exhibition is a textural terrain of a visual vocabulary that recurs as maps, grids, and aerial terrains in his historic evolution.

Within a medley of notations, marks, cyphers, and signs into densely layered graphic ensembles, it is the graphic elements, hand colouring, and multiplicity that renders each work unique. Finite and Infinite is also a mapping of deeper considerations of time, space, and movement and his love for transcending the linearity of the physical world within the web of his personal experience.