Untitled

Arun’s paintings look like mottled abstractions from a distance, but on closer look reveal figures or fragments of text and a canvas thick with layers that fade in parts to reveal images underneath.

Minuscule caricature-like figures with gaping mouths—a gathering of initiates singing at their first holy communion—crowd the surface of the large panel of Untitled (2014) exhibited at the Biennale. Each face is near-indistinguishable from the rest, as if to suggest the loss of individuality within a religious collective.

To Arun, who grew up in an orthodox Christian family in Kerala, depictions of this and other Christian imagery are not an affirmation of religious fervour but an expression of his misgivings about religious indoctrination. “You are marked by it (religion), and even if you reject it, you cannot fully escape it, because it is a continuous living tradition and is bound up with the deepest regions of the self,” he says.

In Arun’s works, religious initiation as a theme points to his recurrent engagement with the idea of time. Through his richly layered painterly pursuits, Arun seems to caution us about time as the duration of waiting; where the present is surrendered for a future moment that never arrives–the religious promise of the afterlife.