Tom Vattakuzhy is an artist who is more interested in the intricacies of life than in the niceties of art. His recent paintings are about the place and people among whom he lives. In a majority of them he explores the community’s inner life through images that capture the interpersonal relationships within an archetypal family consisting of a woman, a man, children and sometimes an older man. It is an intimate portrait of their inner life. Like many parts of Kerala, once an agrarian community, they are now part of a remittance economy. Tom’s paintings look into the emotional scars this leaves on families, especially on women. Living off money sent by absent males, their lives have become lonely and unproductive. The bare, unkempt interiors of their homes echo their inner barrenness and ennui. Compared to the women, the men in Tom’s paintings are marginal and even more insubstantial, almost spectral apparitions of absent people. The gloom and miasma of their fractured lives permeate these paintings. Only the children remain untouched in this otherwise still and silent world. They alone live lives of intimacy, play, curiosity and joyfulness, and they present a telling contrast to the alienated lives of adults.
Occasionally, he paints a scene bereft of human presence permeated by the uncanny or a pot of flowers that evoke the strange coexistence of opposites, including life and death. Even more occasionally, he presents us with an image of intimate empathy tinged by the transcendental sublime.
Tom employs an unpainterly and highly descriptive naturalism in these paintings. This is strategic and effective. It gives the impression of neutrality, positions the artist as a witness, and suggests that the world is painting itself. However, like the children, light is an active element in these paintings. It breaks in from every possible angle and side, brings certain things into visibility and pushes others into shadow. It brings the outer world into the paintings as shadows of invisible things and reflects the emotional weather of those who inhabit his painted interiors. With changing light, the mood shifts from the poignant to the ominous and other subtle shades in between. In other words, light is the artist’s representative in these paintings.
–R. Siva Kumar