“Art is the aesthetics of coexistence and struggle,” reads a rectangular white board placed beside the door to Shibu Chand’s latest art exhibition Text/Context at Alliance Française de Trivandrum. On entering, scrolls of illustrations painted on mediums ranging from a stripped sky-blue lungi to a machine-made khadi cloth hang down the off-white walls of the gallery. However, Shibu’s experiments with his paintings were born out of scarcity rather than choice.
As the world was forced into a slumber following the pandemic, artists like Shibu were compelled to consider alternatives to the traditional canvas due to a shortage of art supplies. “I started painting on the lungi, then I found it interesting, and I moved on to other fabrics,” says Shibu. The curation contains 14 artworks drawn or painted across different mediums at different sizes which were created by the artist within a span of three years from 2021 to 2024.
It is Shibu’s seventh solo exhibition and his third in Thiruvananthapuram. This exhibition contains works from his Limited Spaces series and Situations series, some of which have been put on display at a group art exhibition in Jehangir Museum, Mumbai . Recurring themes The four paintings displayed from the Limited Spaces series, discuss themes of discomfort and disappearance.
Painting from the Limited Spaces series by artist Shibu Chand| Photo Credit:Nainu Oommen One of the works, which uses acrylic on a printed sheet, was inspired by an incident.
