Untitled

A chance to study at Ecole des Beaux-Arts provided Akkitham Narayanan to shift permanently to Paris where he went on, like his fellow artists V. Viswanadhan and S. H. Raza, to paint in the abstract. Like them, his work too was based in an indigenous tradition that had its roots in tantra. But Narayanan was not content to let this esoteric language claim his entire compositions to which he added the notion of a ‘script’ which he used almost like a pattern. The symmetry creates a sense of angular forms along with the graceful elegance of a running script that, taken together, seem to be like a page from an almanac—perhaps the kind of viewer reaction the artist was seeking in drawing our attention back to India’s civilisational roots.