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PRINTMAKING Fingers in many Prints A. Balasubramaniam's printmaking and communication skills makes a deep impression on Geeta Doctor. [[image]] Impression from Body (Hand). Paper pulp. Multiple. 1998. The first thing you notice about A. Balasubramaniam, artist and printmaker from the south, are his fingerprints. Of late he's been leaving them all over the place at exhibitions in Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi for one thing and in the galleries of Austria, Spain and Switzerland for another. The fingerprints are very large ones. They occupy the entire space of his creations which sometimes have a three-dimensional quality that makes them look like data being punched out on a card. The repetition only enhances the sense of alienness. These are fingerprints deconstructed but not destroyed. The manner in which he has presented the impression of his fingers in carefully contrasted textures and framed contours creates in the viewer an immediate tactile understanding. It's not that you want to touch them, but just that you know instinctively what they feel like. The very familiarity of the ridged series of loops and whorls, in white upon white, or in metallic textures, that are placed side by side in a negative-positive manner, forces you to accept their strangeness. Playing with these opposite and opposing forces, in progressively self-assured compositions that show him as an artist who is capable of developing even within an apparently narrow field, has formed part of Balasubramaniam's journey of discovery. It's as though the very lightness of the baggage he carries has allowed him complete freedom to be himself, in an increasingly homogenised world. "You leave your fingerprint all over the place, but you do not think about it. Everyone has a fingerprint but no one has the same one. These are limited printed from unlimited prints and, accordingly, one of my works has been called, Limited from Unlimited. I used the impression of my own thumb consciously, though the work deals with something of which we are unconscious". Bala, as he likes to call himself, has a frank, fresh face. He smiles easily, laughing when he can't find a word to explain himself in English, which he now speaks with a very light American intonation. The young boy who had to repeatedly knock at the door of the Government Arts College in Chennai before he could gain entrance into the formalised process of art education now spends at least half the year in some country in the west. He says he was largely inspired by the solitary forays that he made to the local public library where he devoured the images created by Rothko and other American artists. Bala still seems boyishly young as he tosses his hair, which looks very fashionably groomed, long at the top, but closely cropped at the back and sides. But when he talks about his work, his slightly slanting eyes narrow and darken. He says he had to learn English very fast when he received a Charles Wallace grant to go to Edinburgh. Even now, he sometimes breaks off and explains himself in Tamil. "I have no problem in making myself understood because when I first [[image]] Limited from Unlimited. Silkscreen, granite powder and PVC. 1999. 36 THE ART NEWS MAGAZINE OF INDIA VOL. V ISSUE I
