Text Decoded - I

Born in 1928 in Shimla, Swaminathan was passionately fond of drawing and painting from his childhood. Multi-faceted Swaminathan was an artist, writer, ideologue, institution maker and activist.

He founded ‘Group 1980’, the manifesto of the group written by Swaminathan declared, “art for us is not born out of a preoccupation with the human condition, we do not sing of man nor are we his messiahs. Art is neither conformity of reality nor a flight for it, it is reality itself, a whole new world of experience, the threshold for the passage into the state of freedom”.

In the 80’s and 90’s Swaminathan broke away from his bird mountain paintings, going back to retrieve the tribal- folk inspired style with which he had started in the early 1960’s.

In ‘Text Decoded’, Swaminathan limits the pictorial plane to a triangular form which becomes the focal point of the painting. The painting makes a strong monochromatic statement, and is surrounded by a mysterious shape in the centre. The work is an assemblage of enigmatic lines and shapes.