Indian Resonances & ‘The Colours of Suriname

8/3/2019 Indian Resonances & The Colours of Suriname

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INDIAN RESONANCES IN THE COLOURS OF SURINAME

Every year, during the month of June, in Suriname, India glows iridescently.

Its a time when the peoples of this small, yet richly diverse, multi-lingual

(including Hindi), multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society an exemplar of

harmony in the Americas pause and reflect on Indian-ness: its generalcharacter and historicity, new and emerging dimensions, and the role it has

played in the shaping of the plurivocal Sranang-persona. This year, on June

5th, the commemorative day marking the arrival of the first indentured

labourers in Suriname from India, a unique art exhibition opened its doors at

the prestigious Fort Zeelandia Museum in the capital city, Paramaribo.

Featuring works of Surinamese art luminaries - Ruben Karsters, Anand Binda,

and George Ramjiawansingh - Colours of Suriname was sponsored by the

Embassy of the Republic of India; and Indias Minister of Overseas Affairs &

Culture, the Honourable Vayalar Ravi, traveled to this distant republic in

Amazonia to declare the exhibition officially open.

George Ramjiawansingh

Astounding artistic versatility plus clear, prolific, self-assured expressionism

underscore George Ramjiawansinghs polychromatic display and contribution

towards The Colours of Suriname exhibition. Art is the expression of the

inner self, the artist says. Its one of the last real freedoms left to humans inthe modern world.

George Ramjiawansingh is the youngest of the three artists. The themes of his

works range from pure abstract conceptions, slices of rural and urban life,

ideational representations, social statements, nature scenes of Surinamese flora

and fauna, and an array of creations that capture the plurality of the national

milieu. In this exhibition, the artist displays works on canvas, sculpted and

welded metallic installations, and stunning, live, decorative floral installations.

The artists abstract panels, Natural History & Love, Meditation Music, andPaint your Internal Images, feature eight phenomenally effective and

affective works which pull gallery viewers into the wonder of a space odyssey.

Be it the Milky Way or otherwise, the artist explores albeit fleetingly a slice

of the origin of things in a glimmering moment of primordial time. As the

viewer moves from one panel to another s/he approaches the void and that


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first light, the big-bang, from which it all emerged in time and space.

If one were to step back and take a birds eye view of his works on exhibition

the notion of an unseen and or emerging light source hovers about many of

Ramjiawansinghs creations. His massive floral creation entitled Love You,Mother Nature which captures the rich, lush life with its hidden possibilities

in the rainforest the heartland of Suriname contains, as a backdrop, a

massive sun-circle, 9 feet in diameter. Striking indeed! And the more one

contemplates this recurrent leitmotiv in the artists work, one knows that this

son of the Indian diaspora at one and the same time celebrates the beauty and

richness of Amazonia, plus he secretly pro-naams to Surya, and pays unseen

obeisance to Gaea Ma smilingly radiant in the rich heliconia petal spray,

flowing water, and bamboo grasses growing amid the rocks, earth and stones.

In the open fresh air on the rooftop of the Fort Zeelandia Museum inParamaribo, on the bank of the Suriname River, can any aesthete with a

cultivated sensibility miss the hidden spiritual landscape from which this artist

draws his inspiration and creativity? With his rich splash of bright, variegated

tropical colours, Ramjiawansijngh successfully takes his viewers on a stroll

through Suriname, and into his own art-scape profoundly fascinated with

expressions of urbane reality combined with that which is primordial,

expansive, and timeless.

Anand Binda

Anand Binda is no stranger to international art galleries, including India. The

last exhibition of his paintings on the subcontinent was in 2005 at the

Chitrakala Parishuth Art Gallery in Bangalore, south India. The themes of his

paintings, which includes oils and acrylic works on canvas, watercolours, and

lino-cuts, can be broken into: Trees and Rivers, Portraits, Horses,

Landscapes, Birds, Rapids, Dancers and Figures.

Stylistically, at first glance, his works show strong influences of French

impressionism. Objects are not to be presented as they appear rather, its a

special elucidation, or should one use the word, illumination, in Bindas case,which the creative work reveals. Painting is a conscious journey into the

unknown, the artist says. This telling, succinctly-stated credo implies a

conscious exploratory dimension in each of his paintings. Indeed a visual

review of the artists works Trees and Rivers reveals them as etudes on

canvas.


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Without surrendering to the dream-like world of the surrealists or new-age neo-

surrealists, and not embracing banal realism either, Binda achieves the curious

effect of a fusion of both worlds. Objects of reality are there, but back-

grounded. His concern seems to be one of consciously tearing away two or

three veneered layers of common sensual experience and reality to reveal anunseen hidden world which is visibly present beneath the palpable. And the

finished effect at one and the same time is the recognizable re-moulded

through the deft spell of the artists gifted imagination and masterful

execution.

Critics in the past have remarked that Bindas paintings seem to pulsate no

doubt responding to the dual presence: the clearly recognizable and its

revelatory reformulation reshaped on canvas. Undoubtedly, objects do appear

energized and vibrant on his canvases at times even approaching Turner-

esque radiance. However, the repetitive nature of this effect consistentlyapplied across a range of themes suggests that perhaps Anand Bindas

achievement is his creation, development and successful refinement of a

technique that effectively transports his viewers beyond the visible, but to the

detriment and loss of neither the original natural object nor his artistic re-

mould. According to the artist, Its all about the harmonious balance between

emotions and intellect.

By nature a deep thinker, Bindas paintings reflect strong cognitive activity

as if the artist has successfully defined a new course in the creation of beauty.

His successive launches into impressionistic reality seem to have yielded a

unique strand of creativity which strikingly stands out in the Colours of

Suriname exhibition: Many of his works with the exception of his portraits -

appear as sliced jewels. It is as if Bindas world of creative etudes are

progressively seen through the lens of a jeweled prism and, in the end, art-

aesthetes move in his imaginative consciousness on canvases looking at objects

of sense through diamond-prisms of light.

Ruben Karsters

Ruben Karsters, the eldest of the three Surinamese artists, minces no words

about the subjects of his creative passions. All are solidly grounded in

objective sensate reality and presented in equally indeed strikingly lucid

terms. His art is as classical as it gets. Art is verisimilitude, to invoke the

Greek concept re-energized in 18th century language. And Surinames most

respected portraitist is unapologetic about his mimetic style each piece deftly

executed with grace and finesse. The artist, in his aesthetic credo, has an


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infinite range of creative possibilities within the palpable world of objects

and so capturing the expressiveness of an individual subject, and reflecting

through his creativity both what is strikingly individual and essential to the

subjects character is all in all for the 65 year old artist.

Many at home and abroad - familiar admirer and first-time gallery viewer -

place Karsters in a class by himself. The Indian Minister of Overseas Affairs

& Culture, the Honourable Vayalar Ravi, a first-time viewer in Paramaribo, at

the opening of the Colours of Suriname Exhibition, reminisced about Indias

world-famous author and painter S.M. Hoessein, when he saw Karsters work.

Genuinely acknowledged as an autodidact, Karsters, at the age of seven, was an

acknowledged wonder. So impressed were senior artists of the time, at the

tender age of 12, they drafted him into their coterie. Before his fourteenth

birthday, at the request of a Dutch amateur artist, he began teaching art, free of

charge, to children between the ages of 8 to 13. At 20, young Ruben departedon a scholarship for the Netherlands where he formally studied art for seven

years.

A visitor to his private artistic sanctum an attic chamber perched atop his

one-flat family dwelling and accessible by a flight of spartan wooden steps -

treads with care in recognition that this environment has been purged of all

thats non-artistic. The artists lifestyle cut to the chase. Only essentials

there are no superfluities or excesses. In this sanctum of Apollo and his muses

- a veritable gallery of expressive faces, sensitive nude studies, and images

executed in multi-media formats many framed, others on canvas, some in

progress, others near completion but each and every one fastidiously

executed with the care that sometimes engages the artists creative powers 15

hours a day the visitor senses that the very particles of air one breathes in this

space have been sanitized and re-vivified by the goddess of art and beauty

herself.

Its quite simple, he says, the serious student must first learn to see the

object of art and beauty as it truly is. And so, drawing comes first. In the

beginning, the untrained eye fails to discern many subtleties about any object.

Karsters has spent the better part of sixty years seeking to perceive objects in

ever-deepening clarity to the point of seeking out ever-deeply every subtle,

hidden nuance of tone, colour, shade and shadow ever-present in the world of

objective reality. This is the devout passion of Ruben Karsters artistic

consciousness. The extent of his penetrative vision and the gift of his


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reproductive capacity are truly remarkable and rarely seen these days in the

world of visual arts. Given his obsession with light and shadows, some art

critics compare him to his 17th century namesake, Rubens curiously, of

Dutch-Flemish origins. Watching him train and guide gifted students even as

an Eskimo easily perceives twenty different shades of white, Karsters visualawareness of gradations of hues, light and shades have penetrated to non-

human levels.

With his fusillade of techniques honed over many years of successful

experimentation, its a marvel to visit him when hes consummately engaged in

creating his masterpieces. Contemporary gallery viewers in India will be

intrigued with his three contrastive studies of Kareena Kapoor. They lend

themselves to a fascinating contemplation of this artists obsession with

technique and execution: one study, fully executed using the gray scale; the

second, in full-colour; and the third, a multi-media creation with the modernstar in traditional Indian garb. The portrait study of Kapoor is complimented

with the Karsters take on popular singer, Himesh Reshammiya, in a cap, of

course, and likewise, Jawarhalal Nehru, Indias first Prime Minister.

The work entitled Mohan, Martin, Malcolm, Mandel: Matajis 4 Ms will

undoubtedly enchant aesthetes on the sub-continent. Its a nostalgic reflective

study of four masters of politics by the master of art himself. The glowing

liberated faces of Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela appear above the

contemplative, serious almost troubled - busts of Martin Luther King and

Malcolm X, the American freedom fighters, also men of colour. Indeed,

gazing to his left, the beaming, joyous face of the Mahatma, the apostle of

peace, clad in white the son of India and father of the modern independence

movement appears to have inoculated and infected his dancing counterpart,

Nelson Mandela; both freedom fighters, who ironically were dramatically

pitted at differing periods against entrenched Dutch supremacy and interests in

southern Africa.

Life-like beauty, touching simplicity, sensitive charm such are the key

signatures of Ruben Karsters creativity. He is a living, embodied instantiation

of the genius of a modern renaissance master in Suriname.

When I was aesthetically satiated and finally appeased to leave the Fort

Zeelandia Museum on Indian Arrival Day in Suriname, I inwardly mused:

Its amazing, though oceans away, how the memory of the ancient land of

Bharata has been reignited with refreshing vitality through these three gifted,


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creative intelligences.

August 2007

Paramaribo, Suriname

All rights reserved

Written by Ivan A. Khayiat, M.A.

Expressly for Indian Resonances & The Colours of Suriname ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Copyrights Ruben Karsters, April 2009

Indian Resonances & ‘The Colours of Suriname

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