NEW DELHI
A. Balasubramaniam: (IN) Visible
Talwar Gallery

Throughout his work in diverse media, including printmaking, painting and sculpture, A. Balasubramaniam toys with contrasting ideas: evanescence and physicality, illusion and reality, playfulness and sobriety. New York’s’ Talwar Gallery inaugurated its new space in New Delhi with “(IN)VISIBLE,” a solo exhibition of the artist’s recent works. Since 2000, Balasubramaniam has increasingly explored sculpture and installation and this show, taking up the gallery’s two floors, indicates his evolution as an artist.

One work, Breath (2007), remains invisible until it is pointed out. Balasubramaniam bored two shallow holes into a wall at the height of his nostrils. This simple, haunting intervention evokes the presence of a body by underscoring its absence while also directing one’s attention, as in yoga, to the act of breathing. The work reveals Balasubramaniam’s skill at provoking unconscious relations from viewers in order to communicate philosophical ideas.

Breath’s approach to embodying the imperceptible contrasts with the gigantic and tactile Tree Inside (2006), cast in fiberglass and silicone from a section of a fallen tree trunk found on the roadside. This immense piece dominates an entire room in the gallery, mediating between nature and technology, reality and fantasy, as it suggests the possibility of a narrative—how did this get here?—while faithfully reproducing the contours and textures of a mundane object.

Upstairs, a seemingly forgotten iron beam propped up against the wall in Untitled (2006) draws viewers into a sudden world of disbelief. The wall, made from fiberglass and painted white, sags conspicuously where the beam’s tip rests against it. An earlier work, Untitled (2002), displayed downstairs, follows a similar tack. In this case, a solid wall is seemingly pulled, like fabric, by a rope placed in a cast of the artist’s had that extends from an adjacent wall. These optical tricks, though dazzling in themselves, undermine the old aphorism that seeing is believing.

Balasubramaniam’s quirky sense of humor is most evident in Gravity (2006), a white cast of his face plunging to the ground in a sack suspended from a peg, and in Energy Field (2006), a golden apple placed at eye level on a pristine white pedestal. Touch it and you receive a sudden electric shock. The electrified apple simultaneously alludes the temptation of Adam and Eve and Newton’s discovery of the law of gravity, and appropriately reflects the themes of exploration and experience that resonate throughout the show.

--Minhazz Majumdar