KCS Paniker’s Painterly Deflections

In 1963, the Chennai-based artist KCS Paniker shifted his mode of painting from ethereal, floating, sketchy bodies to a series entitled Words and Symbols that occupied him until his death in 1977. These paintings combine writing, symbols, geometry, equations, charts, rivers, trees, and a multitude of birds and animals. The text – in English, Malayalam, and Sanskrit – cannot be read beyond a word or two, the diagrams hint at astrology and birth charts, and the symbols echo ancient linear drawings and math textbooks. Paniker’s use of paint enhances the experience of nearly understanding: he works in layers, ending with a thin cream of pigment, painting over symbols or even his own signature. The invitation to gaze, only to deflect it elsewhere into a fragmented and shifting experience of looking, is perhaps most pointed in the works he paints on anodized aluminum. In these, the surface of the metal peeks through, not enough to provide a clear reflection, but enough to create productive misreadings, confounding surface and ground, color and light, or line and unmarked space. Paniker’s Words and Symbols works allow entry only through a sideways glance; they deflect the gaze, thereby questioning the solidity of seeing, reading, and knowing.