Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present a solo exhibition in Brussels by Indian artist Viswanadhan, following a highly acclaimed debut in Paris in 2024, thus celebrating the start of his representation by the gallery. A major figure in contemporary abstract painting, the artist has gained international recognition, which grew even further in 2025. The Sharjah Biennial dedicated a monographic pavilion to him, bringing together more than forty works spanning six decades, through which he explores the tantric geometries of his childhood in a subtle movement that leads them towards modernity.
The exhibition presents a selection of works on paper (2014-2016) offering an immersion into the heart of Viswanadhan's artistic research: a journey through spaces where colour, light and gesture intertwine, flirting with the sacred. In this voluptuous array of tones, red gradually asserts itself as the dominant colour. It embodies the progressive refinement of a palette that, since the late 1990s, has narrowed to focus on the traditional colours of kalamezhuthu¹ - green, yellow, red, black and white. Sovereign red, red as vital energy, red deeply rooted in the artist's native region.
Born in 1940 in a village in Kerala, southern India, into the Vishvakarmas community-artists, artisans, sculptors and architects associated with temples-Viswanadhan grew up in an environment where spirituality permeated every gesture. Introduced to idol carving and mandalas from childhood, he developed an intimate relationship with forms, rhythms and symbols at an early age, which would continue to resonate throughout his work.
His training at the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Madras (now Chennai) introduced him to the fundamentals of Western art. While the Bombay school embraced the international avant-garde directly, those in Madras and Calcutta favoured a more syncretic approach, combining Western knowledge acquired through British colonisation with the uncodified 'innate knowledge' of traditional Indian cultures.
This approach was further reinforced in 1968, when he left India to travel to Europe. His decisive encounter with Myriam Prévot in Paris, then director of the Galerie de France, played a decisive role: she offered him his first solo exhibition in 1970, encouraging him to settle permanently in the capital, while maintaining a deep connection with his native country. Co-founder in 1966, with K.C.S. Paniker, of the Cholamandal Artists' Village, he returned there regularly to work in his original studio. As Bernard Blistène points out, this constant movement between two worlds gives his approach 'a duality that is both singular and complex, in which our contemporaries recognise a plural modernity'².
Viswanadhan makes tantric geometry the central language of his work. The Shri Yantra, a sacred motif in Hinduism, appears transfigured in an almost calligraphic style, becoming a set of lines and intervals that replay the balance of opposites and the circulation between the cosmos and interiority. From the 1990s onwards, his work became increasingly refined: tighter forms, a palette reduced to symbolic tones, vibrant light rendered by casein on canvas or handmade paper, which he particularly favours.
Viswanadhan captures movement in every stroke and nuance, transforming them into journeys rather than surfaces. He favours a horizontal structure where the image glides, approaches and recedes. This choice is consistent with his cinematographic practice. He is the author of a series of films on the five elements, Sable/Sand, Eau/Ganga, Agni/Feu, Air/Vayu and Ether/Aakash, which poetically explore Indian landscapes, mythological places and the symbolic gestures of vernacular India. Later, his film Les Terres de France (2015) paid tribute to his European masters in an installation of 21 panels of earth. This work, along with that from his film Sable, is now part of the Centre Pompidou's collection of modern and contemporary art.
Within these singularities, the Western eye sometimes clumsily attempts to fit Viswanadhan's images into a familiar aesthetic framework, at the risk of altering their essence. These superficial interpretations fail to perceive the depth of his work. Jean-Jacques Lévêque³ aptly described him as a 'surveyor of infinity', someone who, through his actions, opens up and cultivates space.
Suspended like open windows, Viswanadhan's works invite us to cross the threshold into a vibrant unknown, where 'the great unconscious' comes to the surface. 'The paintings arise from the wonder-filled void that settles in. They are mirrors of absence, of a vaster space beyond,' writes Michael Peppiatt⁴. Thus unfolds Viswanadhan's art: a crossing, a call, a space offered - where painting does not describe the world, but reveals within us that which remains boundless.
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¹ A ritual practice in Kerala that involves drawing sacred figures on the ground using vegetable or mineral-based coloured powders (black, red, yellow, green, white), traditionally performed during ceremonies dedicated to the deities.
² Bernard Blistène, Le Maître et l'Univers [catalogue], Galerie Nathalie Obadia, 2025. Bernard Blistène is a French art historian and curator, former director of the Musée national d'Art moderne - Centre Pompidou (2013-2021).
³ Jean Jacques Lévèque is a French historian and art critic.
⁴ Michael Peppiatt is a British art historian and critic. He has curated numerous exhibitions devoted to 20th-century artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Christian Schad and Antoni Tàpies, and is recognised as a leading authority in the field of art criticism.
