Dystopia used to be an imagined reality; something existed in the minds and expressions of the artists, filmmakers and writers. It was a curiosity mixed with fear and exhilarating anticipation, all in at once, a perverted inversion of everything that had been familiar. The past tense no longer matters. The imminent one is here and now, a new truth has been born, which is post-truth in essence where truth takes a backseat and lies create an environment or habitat of discomforts turned to affordable socio-cultural and political eco system. The cruelty of all kinds of aberrations form the generic and normal has become a new norm, the consent has been manufactured, everyone is settled and an ideologically manageable society is created. However, something is rotten and the crinkling of the noses cannot be hidden anymore from the pretension of calmness. Under the thin veneer of satisfaction there lies the chaotic hell of existential reality; pushed beneath a brittle transparent glassy earth the immanent breakage unsettles everything. But it is imperative that someone has to tell it at your face and that’s what Nemom Pushparaj does through his paintings and sculptural reliefs.
The dystopian reality has always been a thing of concern or point of departure for Nemom. An accident had turned the world around him. From a hospital bed he could see a world which was otherwise hidden from everyone’s mundane visions. Already hooked to the styles of the surrealist masters the young painter started having visions which were metaphysical, surreal and irreal. He needed a language to express all what he had seen in his mind. It was not just fantasizing from a sickbed but it was a series of thoughts alchemized into imaginations that carried more truth of the larger time than the immediate reality. The language came with it, definitely with its surreal stylistic baggage. The reluctance to do away with the indebtedness to a particular painterly style shown by Nemom persisted and he, as the years progressed, perfected it to his purpose. The early works as well as the latest ones in this exhibition give evidence to the transformation of Nemom’s artistic journey and the evolution of his pictorial language. As mentioned above, he was not making fantasies, a sort of cut and paste making of a new reality, meant to entertain or shock the viewers, but each painting came from a series of thoughts that had amalgamated into strong imaginations capable of attracting attention and setting such attentive minds into a thinking mode. Hence, in eachpainting of Nemom one could witness the traces of personal turning in to political and universal. Personal political beliefs strictly do not decide the course of Nemom’s painterly acts but the political content of the dystopian realities cannot escape from the eyes of a keen painter. The images that are originated from personal anxieties transcend themselves into universally understandable symbolic sets and become a part of the viewers’ thinking process.
One of the new works of Nemom shows a ‘meta-modern’ where extremely convoluted architectures mark the skyline and elephant heads turned into enticingly beautiful butterflies with eerily cannibalized looks flitter around to reach a garden now grown in a pram, a sort of limited and miniature edition of the nature. This perversity of meta-modernism establishes the dystopian realities visualized by Nemom in his works. Meta-modernism is something that has ousted the liberal and inclusive post-modernism of the last century. It revels in contradictory extremes in order to achieve certain goals which could otherwise be gained through reason and negotiation. The contradictory extremism of the dystopian society/reality somehow perverts the sense of justice and equity political programs. Nemom strongly and deliberately contests these aberrations from the normative practices of politics. He never shies from the fact that his works could be misunderstood as a different sort of propaganda for certain ideology. But upon looking closer and harder one could see certain idealism of the artist at work in each image and metaphor, be it the masks of the founding fathers of the modern world or the oppositional ideologies propagated by religious reformists in historical junctures. As these images are mediatized their intended meanings are easy to ‘read’ but what makes them intriguing paintings is their capacity to take the viewers from the apparent meanings to a series of metaphorical unspooling of historical as well as contemporary events, familiar to them but yet not deeply thought about as their mundane pursuits keep them busy like bees.
Apparent but radically meandering meanings that Nemom creates have had their evolution throughout his painterly career. The surrealism of early years now has given way to a more sophisticated and hyper-realistic painterly style. These do not belong to any so called isms or schools that the viewers have familiarized through their engagements with different kinds of contemporary art practices. Nemom himself does not categorize his works anymore as works inspired by surrealism. However, the symbolic repertoire that he has developed for his purpose to express dystopian realities comes across as fresh and invigorating. In his early works he had paid rich tribute to Salvador Dali, whom he once considered as his spiritual teacher in art. But this image of Dali comes back as a reference in one of the recent paintings that has almost summarized the image repertoire to which Nemon often falls back to enrich his paintings. The stock images that have migrated from the yesteryears to the present day might have even surprised the artist himself because there is something like the ‘persistence of memory’ in his works. Here I am not referring to the work of Salvador Dali but the idea oftime, time machine and the time machinery which is materialized visually by revealing the mechanism of a grand clock. Nemom is aware of the micro time and the macro time. Perhaps he does not need Dali to come to his aid in this understanding. He has absorbed the multidimensional and philosophical values of time through studying Indian mythology vis-à-vis Indian socio-political reality.
Nemom Pushparaj says that the image of Ganesha or Ganapati is the highest form of surrealism that he has ever witnessed, and Ganesh does make cameo appearances in his paintings. Nemom Pushparaj has a political ideology to lead him in life. Like any other peace and justice loving human being, he has seen the reality being thwarted by the revolutionizing digital eco system, which he accepts and respects as the ‘new reality’. However, for the sake of any reality one cannot do away with the systems of equal rights and justice meant for the last human being on earth. The dystopia is here. Unconditional acceptance of it means nothing but the failing the human beings. How to deal with this new reality? By looking straight at its face and say that it does not do any good to the human beings and the eco system in general. Nemom Pushparaj looks at this emergent dystopia and calls the spade a spade; not using a spade but by imaginative, thought provoking and well executed images in his paintings.
