Featured Artist

Artist Statement

The nature of my work has undergone vast changes since I began in 1992. I am presently working with ink with hand-engraved copper metal and copper wire hand-stitched onto paperboard a water-based medium, which radically differs from the conventional watercolors in terms of texture and technique. Experimenting with diverse themes and formal strategies, during the past few years I have been focusing on the many worlds of South Indian spirituality. While my work belongs to this tantric movement in modern Indian art, I have consciously eschewed certain elite tendencies in the movement, and have shied away from pure geometrism. Instead, I invent shapes and colors with deep emotional value and, in most cases, deliberately invert conventional modes and idioms to arrive at fresh meanings. Critics have, therefore, classed my work as neo - tantric to set it apart from the mainstream tantric work.

The Indian Tantric School of painters has concentrated on images culled from Brahminical Hinduism. Though their work is important to me, my work differs to a large extent from the Tantric school in that it draws heavily from South Indian local traditions such as the Siddha cult and its literature. My work is also influenced by village traditions and ritualistic practices. My world is not singular or static, however, but is heterogeneous, fluid, and constantly shifting: it exists in a multicultural universe which is participant in a wide range of media, theatre, literature and other art forms in South India today. I feel, furthermore that my work is not merely an essentialist expression of the local traditions of Tamil Nadu, but is a nomadic attempt at inventing a tradition which takes account of the complexities of the post-modern world.

                                                                               - Logu Ramasamy

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