VISIONS OF/FOR THE PERPLEXED: THE ART OF BAIJU NEENDOOR

Over a period of almost 3 years that he had spent in various countries in the Gulf region as a designer and teacher,  Baiju’s works have undergone a great degree of change from that of his more turbulent paintings of the previous period. The canvases that were full of worldly tumult and conflicts of the perceptual domain turned towards the more solitary predicament of a sacrificial lamb, the skinned torso of animals meant for somebody’s consumption appearing recurrently in the precincts of shopping malls or other alienating spaces. The colours have also changed, though some do persist, the spaces have become more emptied out and the metaphysical atmosphere of a de Chirico work makes itself present, just as it do in the works of another of his comtemporaries and friend, Babu M from Palai. The ochre yellow sand of the Qatar desert, the lack of trees, sharp lights and well demarcated shadows, or the reddish brown of the earth and seashore in Darsait, Oman, the perplexed living of an alienated life- the atmosphere has changed from the chaotic dark and painful everyday complexity of the earlier canvases, to a feeling of emptiness, and towards softer  mid tones.
 
 The camels skinned torso reaches down to a man crying out with flayed hands, seated and standing at the same time, merging in their experiences of being subjected to, and without being able  to figure out one’s own way in this world of disconnects.  A waste  dump elicits the memory  of a pig, a sheep’s head stares at you from amidst buyers carts, and the tonsured sexuality and evicted desire  calls out for a lick or fondling that could quench it. Someone, with hand to one eye, looks on to a world flattened out by the absence of its other, of the life giving.

The bright sun and sharp rocks strewn around the desert landscape do figure in many works of this series. Sometimes the hard rock seem to grow and cover the life supporting organs like the brain or heart, the crustation and solidification of which points to an almost pathological condition, the brain losing its ability to think and connect, the heart failing to open up , pulsate and replenish.

One is reminded of the lines from a famous Malayalam film song

'Everybody do tell us, everybody, there is a stone in that  heart, a dark rock in that heart but when I touched, it turned out to be a piece of  blue sugarcane’(Ellarum chollanu ,ellarum chollanu kallanu nenjilennu..karinkallaanu nenjilennu, enonnu thottappol neelakkarimbinte thundaanu kandathayyaa),

 wherein the stone seems to be given a new life by the touching-  the stone being something that has grown in the heart giving a sense of closure and heaviness. Baiju’s painting of the hard  jagged rocks give them a new life, and at the same time points towards the processes of alienation and solidification that seems to gradually encompass the life-giving and grows upon it leading to closures and heaviness. In that it evokes memories of  Rene Magritte’s imagery as in another work where the heaviness makes itself felt, both as a part of the harshness of the immediate environment and its closures, a rock is seen suspended from a hook in mid-air as it is lifted by an unseen crane, which could be located somewhere outside and in front of the canvas, alongside the position of the viewer. The rock is here still with a trace of the blood red that provides it with life .

The quasi –pathological nature of the condition is also seen in another work where a human form is seen and  merging into a cart from a shopping mall, with hospital equipment and a bottle of blood, the second leg of the figure is not to be seen or is missing and brain laid open and visible. In another painting, one can see a faceless man holding a hose almost like an attendant worker at a petrol pump, with blood dripping rom it as if it were a cut off vein, the petroleum and blood somehow connecting to each other at a perceptual level, even while remaining distinct , connecting the painting in subtle ways to the location of its making.

 The skinned animal torsos (of which one come across many in these works) are also not merely representations here, since they tend to somehow point towards a human predicament, expressionistically crying out across the void, and are at times so conjoined  to the image of the human body, thereby trying  to create a monument to the undifferentiated nature itself.