Shadows Of Absence: The Life And The Larger-Than-Life In Tom Vattakuzhy's Paintings

There's a small detail in Tom Vattakuzhy's 'Lessons Of Life-5' — a large, 72-inch x 108-inch canvas from his 'Lessons Of Life' series, currentl on view at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata, until 20 July, 2025, as part of 'The Shadows Of Absence', the artist's first solo exhibition in India. At first glance, it appears to present an idyllic picture of harmonious family life: a father helping his young daughter take her first steps; the mother in the background, watching from behind a curtain; two other girls playing in a courtyard full of chickens; a red ball lying on the ground. A scene from a happy family home. But look closer and you'll see something in the shadows — the unmistakable shape of a bird of prey hovering above, waiting to strike at any moment.

This is emblematic of Vattakuzhy's broader practice. There's always a sense of more than what meets the eyes; of life happening beyond what you see inside the frame; allusions to larger allegories about the interior lives of his protagonists. Vattakuzhy's paintings are intimate and profound in their intimacy. He likes to put viewers in medias res — in the thick of things. Time seems to stand still in these scenes, interrupted only by the play of light — sometimes soft and surreal, at other times sharp and unreal, bordering on the metaphysical.

"You’re initially drawn in because you like what you see," says Siddharth Sivakumar, Director of Curation & Artist Relations at the Institute Of Contemporary Indian Art, which is co-presenting the exhibition with AstaGuru Auction House. "But as you spend more time in front of the painting, you begin to notice there's much more beyond its surface. You can always create your own narrative. He's placed his own characters in the scene, but they can easily become part of your story and help carry that narrative forward. I think that's what has always fascinated me about his work."

Born into a rural agricultural family based in Kalloorkad, a small village in Kerala on the foothills of the Western Ghats, Vattakuzhy's career began as an illustrator for literary magazines in Kerala. It is from this literary foundation that his paintings derive their narrative density. His paintings condense the atmosphere, mood, and subtext of a passing moment into a single, still image. The result is often haunting: an image that evokes the emotional weight of the last scene of a film, the final sentence of a story, or the breath between memory and forgetting.

In many paintings featured in this exhibition, Vattakuzhy explores the inner life of the community around him through images that portray the subtle dynamics of an archetypal family unit — often composed of a woman, a man, children, and occasionally an elderly male figure. These characters, rendered with slight variations, reappear across different canvases in varying scenarios. By employing this recurring device, Vattakuzhy opens up multiple interpretive possibilities and offers a layered, panoramic view of familial life.

The Evening Sleep of an Old Man, a triptych that unfolds as a three-part meditation on human existence, is among the earliest of these works. At its center lies an aging man, caught in the liminal space between life and death. A wedge of evening light streaming through a window falls softly across his face, guiding the viewer's gaze upward from his weakening form. Around him, the quiet drama of familial response plays out: his grandchildren respond with varying degrees of curiosity — one inspects him with intimate curiosity, another, a girl, observes cautiously from a distance, while the third one, an older boy, bathed in the soft glow of a backlit window, becomes absorbed by a luminescent object in his hand. This object, radiant and otherworldly, evokes the presence of the transcendental. As you look at this image, you get the sense that the sacred is present here, but withdrawn — like the absent men, or the absent God.

To the left of this composition, a solitary woman seemingly registers the weight of this impending loss. Her expression is distraught, her body turned away, as if seeking protection behind a flimsy curtain that mirrors the light illuminating the man. Like him, she becomes a secondary focal point in the composition, linked through both emotion and illumination. Elsewhere, symbolic motifs such as a butterfly resting on the windowsill and the pendulum clock ticking away on the wall serve as memento mori — reminders of the passage of time, mortality, and the inescapable cycle of life and death.

Through these layered domestic scenes, Vattakuzhy transforms the intimate into the universal, capturing the emotional textures of a world shaped by absence, longing, and the enduring rituals of care. The play of light runs throughout the exhibition. Light, in these paintings reveals, conceals, and sanctifies — it seeps through half-opened windows or flares across people's faces, giving a surreal colour to the everyday and the ordinary. At times, it feels as if the painting is lit from within, not from any external source. This internal glow transforms even the most mundane interiors into sites of metaphysical inquiry.

In a society increasingly defined by migration, alienation, and the commodification of domestic life, Vattakuzhy reclaims these interiors as zones of meaning-making. The Shadows of Absence speaks not only to a personal or regional experience but to broader anxieties around home, belonging, and displacement in a rapidly changing world.

The Shadows Of Absence: Recent Works Of Tom Vattakuzhy, curated by R Siva Kumar, is on view at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture till 20 July 2025.

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