Achuthan Kudallur
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Achuthan Kudallur, a writer turned painter is an abstract artist and continues to evolve his abstractions. His works signposts a different approach in his abstract mode of communication and there is never a dull moment in his canvases, making his works visually energetic. Over the years that Achuthan has been painting his abstraction, he has never traveled the beaten track of his works rather each canvas has remained a journey exploring proactively his perceptions, feelings, emotions and sentiments and translating it through his colours that bears affinity to his moods and emotions. His colours are equally evocative as he subtly plays with tones and shades with his reds, browns, blacks and glimmering whites to offer kaleidoscopic enchantment.
Achuthan Kudallur has held numerous Solo Shows between 1977 to 2003 at Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore, His Group Exhibitions were held between 1974 to 2004 at Chennai, Bangalore, New Delhi, Mumbai, Cochin, Dubai, London and Kathmandu He was commissioned in 1991 by Air India at Mumbai. Achuthan has won many awards, which includes 'National Academy Award' in 1988, Tamil Nadu Lalit Kala Akademi Award in 1882 and served as the Commissioner for the X Indian International Triennial in 2001. He has attended numerous camps on invitation by art galleries, hotels, government and private institutions, organizations and foundations from 1980 to 2004. He has traveled to Britain and France from 1992 to 1996. In the last few years he has traveled extensively in Europe and S.E. Asia. His works are in major private and government collections in Germany, Japan, New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Bhuvaneshwar, Kerala and Kolkata.
Born in February 1945, Achuthan Kudallur, who holds a diploma in Civil Engineering, wanted to be a writer at first. Later, the canvas and its colours drew him towards serious painting. The artist grew up in an atmosphere charged with Gandhian values, the writings of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda. His values and views are well depicted in some of his paintings, which are a joyous, riotous spread of colours. And yet some are melancholic, even tragic.
For Achuthan Kudallur, painting is not a dialogue or a conversation, but a communion with colour. His works display a remarkable economy of style and grace. His paintings are of a non-figurative style and the medium he uses is oil. Achutan's art is at once exciting, energetic, yet strangely tranquil. For the viewer, to view, is to invite a kind of haunting.
Inspired by nature and landscapes, his paintings, of Kerala villages, beaches and evenings at the temple, reinforce his belief that remembering implies reinventing. Achuthan Kudallur says, "With a certain nostalgia, I remember the smell of the expressionist paint spread over my canvas in the seventies. I painted in that style because, with my way of looking at the world at that time, there was no other way out. What I do now with the colour is not a logical extension of those pictures, but a confession that such story telling does not necessarily make a picture."
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