WHITE NIGHT
On January 26th, at 4pm, Pondicherry artists Danasegar, Ezhilarasan, and Vengadesan invite you to a very
special event ‘White Night’ in the exhibition spaces at Centre d’Art Citadines, which will host their art works
until February 16th.
The deep friendship that binds these artists goes back to their student years at Bharathiar Palaikoodam
(Pondicherry) and finds its source in a omni-comprehensive vocation for art. ‘White Night’ is the title
chosen by the trio as a password that gives access to their galaxy. It is the common thread that connects
the creative worlds of these seemingly very different artists, the underground river that emerges along
their paths and merges them into an irresistible stream: the absolute joy of creation.
‘White Night’ is this undefinable space between wakefulness and sleep where the mind lowers its guard
and leaves room for vision. This is the moment when the artist, like a shaman, captures all that manifests
through him and embodies the immaterial.
For the three of them it is like a journey. It is a real journey for Ezhilarasan, who found in the Himalayas his
land of choice. There, he could absorb its purity, its glaciers, its primordial colors, which he restores back in
the form of emotional and sensory landscapes. He paints his canvases as if they were walls, on the
degenerated surface of the city life, with spots, graffiti, intersecting color layers, porous fragments of
bodies that live convulsive realities.
For Danasegar, too, the human body is not a separate entity. It is everything, it is everywhere, it is the
matter that surrounds it, the subject and the object. Danasegar travels in his dreams. In this world of the
inexplicable, he is the magician. There he meets his ancestors, people passed away since time immemorial,
to whom he gives voice. He fills his daily life with dreamlike stories, labyrinths of colors torn from the
invisible.
Vengadesan was struck down in Varanasi. He returns there as we return to the origin. He draws his
inspiration from the Hindu pantheon and its bewitching rites. There he found small statues of Kali, or Shiva.
Now he is filling his canvases with formidable mineral-skinned divinities that sit in low relief on their
kingdom of temples, stairways that run down to the Ganges, surrounded by sannyasin and Nandi. His art
links together innumerable coexistences, states of consciousness declined to infinity.
‘White Night’ is the nocturnal creatures of Vengadesan, the black light of creation, according to Ezhilarasan,
the light and the dark, the two apparently irreconcilable aspects of the same reality, according to
Danasegar. It is the blanks left by the artists as a space of the unfinished, where the pictorial and non-
pictorial language stops to give way to the inexpressible.
Dominique, january 2019
