This year, from October 18th through November 1st, the people of the Republic of India welcome “The Colours of Suriname” at its celebrated Mandi House Art Gallery in New Delhi, India. 
“Indian Resonances in the ‘Colours of Suriname’ ” offers a critical review of the art expo which was on display in Suriname to mark the Celebration of Indian Arrival Day.

“INDIAN RESONANCES IN THE ‘COLOURS OF SURINAME’  ”

Every year, during the month of June, in Suriname, India glows iridescently.  It’s a time when the peoples of this small, yet richly diverse, multi-lingual (including Hindi), multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society – an exemplar of harmony in the Americas – pause and reflect on ‘Indian-ness’:  its general character and historicity, new and emerging dimensions, and the role it has played in the shaping of the plurivocal ‘Sranang’-persona.  This year, on June 5th, the commemorative day marking the arrival of the first indentured labourers in Suriname from India, a unique art exhibition opened its doors at the prestigious Fort Zeelandia Museum in the capital city, Paramaribo.  Featuring works of Surinamese art luminaries - Ruben Karsters, Anand Binda, and George Ramjiawansingh - “Colours of Suriname” was sponsored by the Embassy of the Republic of India; and India’s Minister of Overseas Affairs & Culture, the Honourable Vayalar Ravi, traveled to this distant republic in Amazonia to declare the exhibition officially open.

George Ramjiawansingh

Astounding artistic versatility plus clear, prolific, self-assured expressionism underscore George Ramjiawansingh’s polychromatic display and contribution towards “The Colours of Suriname” exhibition.  “Art is the expression of the inner self,” the artist says.  “It’s one of the last real freedoms left to humans in the modern world.”

George Ramjiawansingh is the youngest of the three artists.  The themes of his works range from pure abstract conceptions, slices of rural and urban life, ideational representations, social statements, nature scenes of Surinamese flora and fauna, and an array of creations that capture the plurality of the national milieu.  In this exhibition, the artist displays works on canvas, sculpted and welded metallic installations, and stunning, live, decorative floral installations.

The artist’s abstract panels, ‘Natural History & Love’, ‘Meditation Music’, and ‘Paint your Internal Images’, feature eight phenomenally effective and affective works which pull gallery viewers into the wonder of a space odyssey.  Be it the Milky Way or otherwise, the artist explores – albeit fleetingly – a slice of the origin of things in a glimmering moment of primordial time.  As the viewer moves from one panel to another – s/he approaches the void and that first light, the ‘big-bang’, from which it all emerged in time and space. 

If one were to step back and take a bird’s eye view of his works on exhibition the notion of an unseen and or emerging light source hovers about many of Ramjiawansingh’s creations.  His massive floral creation entitled “Love You, Mother Nature” – which captures the rich, lush life with its hidden possibilities in the rainforest – the heartland of Suriname –contains, as a backdrop, a massive sun-circle, 9 feet in diameter.  Striking indeed!  And the more one contemplates this recurrent leitmotiv in the artist’s work, one knows that this son of the Indian diaspora at one and the same time celebrates the beauty and richness of Amazonia, plus he secretly ‘pro-naams’ to Surya, and pays unseen obeisance to Gaea Ma smilingly radiant in the rich heliconia petal spray, flowing water, and bamboo grasses growing amid the rocks, earth and stones. 

In the open fresh air on the rooftop of the Fort Zeelandia Museum in Paramaribo, on the bank of the Suriname River, can any aesthete with a cultivated sensibility miss the hidden spiritual landscape from which this artist draws his inspiration and creativity?  With his rich splash of bright, variegated tropical colours, Ramjiawansijngh successfully takes his viewers on a stroll through Suriname, and into his own art-scape profoundly fascinated with expressions of urbane reality combined with that which is primordial, expansive, and timeless.

Anand Binda

Anand Binda is no stranger to international art galleries, including India.  The last exhibition of his paintings on the subcontinent was in 2005 at the Chitrakala Parishuth Art Gallery in Bangalore, south India.  The themes of his paintings, which includes oils and acrylic works on canvas, watercolours, and lino-cuts, can be broken into:  ‘Trees and Rivers,’ ‘Portraits,’ ‘Horses’, ‘Landscapes’, ‘Birds’, ‘Rapids’, ‘Dancers’ and ‘Figures’.

Stylistically, at first glance, his works show strong influences of French impressionism.  Objects are not to be presented as they appear – rather, it’s a special elucidation, or should one use the word, illumination, in Binda’s case, which the creative work reveals.  “Painting is a conscious journey into the unknown,” the artist says.  This telling, succinctly-stated credo implies a conscious exploratory dimension in each of his paintings.  Indeed a visual review of the artist’s works ‘Trees and Rivers’ reveals them as ‘etudes’ on canvas. 

Without surrendering to the dream-like world of the surrealists or new-age neo-surrealists, and not embracing banal realism either, Binda achieves the curious effect of a fusion of both worlds.  Objects of reality are there, but back-grounded.  His concern seems to be one of consciously tearing away two or three veneered layers of common sensual experience and reality to reveal an unseen hidden world which is visibly present beneath the palpable.  And the finished effect at one and the same time is the recognizable – re-moulded through the deft spell of the artist’s gifted imagination and masterful execution. 

Critics in the past have remarked that Binda’s paintings seem to pulsate – no doubt responding to the dual presence: the clearly recognizable and its revelatory reformulation reshaped on canvas.  Undoubtedly, objects do appear energized and vibrant on his canvases – at times even approaching Turner-esque radiance.  However, the repetitive nature of this effect consistently applied across a range of themes suggests that perhaps Anand Binda’s achievement is his creation, development and successful refinement of a technique that effectively transports his viewers beyond the visible, but to the detriment and loss of neither the original natural object nor his artistic re-mould.  According to the artist, “It’s all about the harmonious balance between emotions and intellect.”

By nature a deep thinker, Binda’s paintings reflect strong cognitive activity – as if the artist has successfully defined a new course in the creation of beauty.   His successive launches into impressionistic reality seem to have yielded a unique strand of creativity which strikingly stands out in the ‘Colours of Suriname’ exhibition:  Many of his works – with the exception of his portraits - appear as sliced jewels.  It is as if Binda’s world of creative ‘etudes’ are  progressively seen through the lens of a jeweled prism – and, in the end, art-aesthetes move in his imaginative consciousness on canvases looking at objects of sense through diamond-prisms of light.

Ruben Karsters

Ruben Karsters, the eldest of the three Surinamese artists, minces no words about the subjects of his creative passions.  All are solidly grounded in objective sensate reality and presented in equally – indeed strikingly – lucid terms.  His art is as classical as it gets.  Art is verisimilitude, to invoke the Greek concept re-energized in 18th century language.  And Suriname’s most respected portraitist is unapologetic about his mimetic style – each piece deftly executed with grace and finesse.  The artist, in his aesthetic credo, has an infinite range of creative possibilities within the palpable world of objects – and so capturing the expressiveness of an individual subject, and reflecting through his creativity both what is strikingly individual and essential to the subject’s character is all in all for the 65 year old artist.

Many at home and abroad - familiar admirer and first-time gallery viewer - place Karsters in a class by himself.  The Indian Minister of Overseas Affairs & Culture, the Honourable Vayalar Ravi, a first-time viewer in Paramaribo, at the opening of the “Colours of Suriname” Exhibition, reminisced about India’s world-famous author and painter S.M. Hoessein, when he saw Karsters’ work.  Genuinely acknowledged as an autodidact, Karsters, at the age of seven, was an acknowledged wonder.  So impressed were senior artists of the time, at the tender age of 12, they drafted him into their coterie.  Before his fourteenth birthday, at the request of a Dutch amateur artist, he began teaching art, free of charge, to children between the ages of 8 to 13.  At 20, young Ruben departed on a scholarship for the Netherlands where he formally studied art for seven years.

A visitor to his private artistic sanctum – an attic chamber perched atop his one-flat family dwelling and accessible by a flight of spartan wooden steps - treads with care in recognition that this environment has been purged of all that’s non-artistic.  The artist’s lifestyle cut to the chase.  Only essentials – there are no superfluities or excesses.  In this sanctum of Apollo and his muses - a veritable gallery of expressive faces, sensitive nude studies, and images executed in multi-media formats – many framed, others on canvas, some in progress, others near completion – but each and every one fastidiously executed with the care that sometimes engages the artist’s creative powers 15 hours a day – the visitor senses that the very particles of air one breathes in this space have been sanitized and re-vivified by the goddess of art and beauty herself.

“It’s quite simple,” he says, “the serious student must first learn to see the object of art and beauty as it truly is.  And so, drawing comes first.  In the beginning, the untrained eye fails to discern many subtleties about any object.”  

Karsters has spent the better part of sixty years seeking to perceive objects in ever-deepening clarity – to the point of seeking out ever-deeply every subtle, hidden nuance of tone, colour, shade and shadow ever-present in the world of objective reality.  This is the devout passion of Ruben Karsters’ artistic consciousness.  The extent of his penetrative vision and the gift of his reproductive capacity are truly remarkable and rarely seen these days in the world of visual arts.  Given his obsession with light and shadows, some art critics compare him to his 17th century namesake, Rubens – curiously, of Dutch-Flemish origins.  Watching him train and guide gifted students – even as an Eskimo easily perceives twenty different shades of ‘white’, Karsters’ visual awareness of gradations of hues, light and shades have penetrated to non-human levels. 

With his fusillade of techniques honed over many years of successful experimentation, it’s a marvel to visit him when he’s consummately engaged in creating his masterpieces.  Contemporary gallery viewers in India will be intrigued with his three contrastive studies of Kareena Kapoor.  They lend themselves to a fascinating contemplation of this artist’s obsession with technique and execution: one study, fully executed using the gray scale; the second, in full-colour; and the third, a multi-media creation with the modern star in traditional Indian garb.  The portrait study of Kapoor is complimented with the Karster’s take on popular singer, Himesh Reshammiya, in a cap, of course, and likewise, Jawarhalal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister.

The work entitled “Mohan, Martin, Malcolm, Mandel: Mataji’s 4 Ms” will undoubtedly enchant aesthetes on the sub-continent.  It’s a nostalgic reflective study of four masters of politics by the master of art himself.  The glowing liberated faces of Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela appear above the contemplative, serious – almost troubled - busts of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, the American freedom fighters, also men of colour.  Indeed, gazing to his left, the beaming, joyous face of the Mahatma, the apostle of peace, clad in white – the son of India and father of the modern independence movement – appears to have inoculated and infected his dancing counterpart, Nelson Mandela; both freedom fighters, who ironically were dramatically pitted at differing periods against entrenched Dutch supremacy and interests in southern Africa. 

Life-like beauty, touching simplicity, sensitive charm – such are the key signatures of Ruben Karsters’ creativity.  He is a living, embodied instantiation of the genius of a modern renaissance master in Suriname.

When I was aesthetically satiated and finally appeased to leave the Fort Zeelandia Museum on Indian Arrival Day in Suriname, I inwardly mused:  “It’s amazing, though oceans away, how the memory of the ancient land of Bharata has been reignited with refreshing vitality through these three gifted, creative intelligences.”

© August 2007
Paramaribo, Suriname
All rights reserved

Written by Ivan A. Khayiat, M.A.
Expressly for “Indian Resonances & ‘The Colours of Suriname’ ”