Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Cats of 99 Lives: Celebrating Cats by Sudhakaran Edakandy







You must be drastically a ‘contemporary’ artist if you have not attempted a ‘cat’ image in your works of art at least once. When artists move from the homo-centric aesthetics to the eco-centric one insignificant beings start appearing in their works. An artist’s greatness and his universal perspective could be measured from the depiction of flora and fauna in his works. Kerala based artist, Sudhakaran Edakandy paints a series devoted to many lives of cats and is currently exhibited at the Lalitha Kala Academy Galleries in Kozhikode. Titled ‘Cats of 99 Lives’ this exhibition features fifty watercolours and three sculptures. Cats are philosophical beings and are great survivors. Their playfulness gives way to some kind of existential seriousness as they grow up. In their detachment they are like ‘Bhishma’ and in their focus they are like ‘Arjuna’. They feature in several comic strips and animation films also. Sudhakaran takes all these aspects into his painterly concerns and has captured the earthly and the other worldly characters of cats. Cats expressing Nava Rasas, a watercolour, is one of the highlights of this exhibition. Sudhakaran’s show is an interesting tribute to our neighbourhood heroes (heroines too) on the roof tops and boundary walls. Also this exhibition indirectly pays rich tribute to the great pictorial traditions like the Kalighat Paintings and the ones created by Ram Kinkar Baij and K.G.Subramanyan. The exhibition continues till 28th May 2017.



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