Untitled

A. Balasubramaniam’s two busts share a transient camaraderie. One of them will last. The other one is made of camphor and will perish. As the camphor portrait evaporates, its material settles on the walls of the vitrine in beautiful crystalline forms that will remain once the sculpture has vanished; like a person who dies, leaving behind the traces of a life – a picture, a video, a voice recording.

The camphor bust, with its eroded features, is like the real man, mortal and aging. The sand-cast bust facing it becomes its portrait, like a photograph, a frozen memory of a moment that is lost forever.In his works, Balasubramaniam often uses his own body as his material. Most of his works are abstract, using the slightest suggestion of a presence to heighten absence, matter to suggest void. These two sculptures stand out as the more conventional portraits. They make us wonder if Balasubramaniam is commenting on the genre of self-portraiture. Glancing in the mirror, Rembrandt had said of his final self-portraits, ‘...and I came, it may be, to look for myself and recognize myself. What have I found? Death painted I see...’

Now that the world is a constant flow of images, the idea of seeking immortality through art seems absurd. Balasubramaniam’s self-portraits – two conventional-looking memorial busts- question the idea of art as the realm of eternity. In using the form of the memorial bust, Balasubramaniam is playing with mortality, of his artwork as well as his own.