After In Good Company, Manas Udayakumar on the studio that shaped him, the friend he lost, and why joy is political

There's a painting in Manas Udayakumar's recent show where a figure reclines on a pai, that low woven cot you find in working-class Tamil homes, the kind that no interior designer has ever touched, surrounded by the archaeology of a shared life: an alcohol bottle, a plant quietly asserting itself, a dog somewhere at the edge of the frame. The face is absent, or almost. The body is present the way a memory is present: more feeling than fact. You look at it and, without meaning to, you think of your own studio apartment at twenty-six, your own floor that was also a bed, your own friends who smelled like cigarettes and ambition. And then you realise, that's the whole point.

Manas wrapped up In Good Company at Ashvita's, Chennai, recently. It was his second solo, and by most measures, the harder one to make. Not because of the technical demands of oil on large canvas, though those were real, but because the work began somewhere he hadn't planned to go: inside a grief so acute, so visceral, that for nearly eight months he did nothing but paint his best friend as a corpse.

He doesn't flinch when he says it. "I saw him ten minutes before they were taking him to the burial spot," he says. "Pale. Pus from his nose. It was disgusting, but then it's a corpse, it doesn't make sense and it will traumatise you, it will suck the life out of you." The image lodged. And like all images that lodge, it demanded to be made, again and again, on large canvases hung across his living room, oils slow-drying for two weeks, the painted face looking back at him. "The memory transferred into a painting, and then the painting kept looking at me."

This is the part of art-making that rarely makes it into press releases. The compulsive return. The way trauma recruits the hand. There is a long tradition of artists who have used repetition not as style but as survival, Käthe Kollwitz drawing her dead son until she could hold him still, Agnes Martin ruling her lines until anxiety had somewhere to go. Manas was doing something similar, though he wouldn't have named it that then. He just knew he couldn't look away.

But then, eventually, he could. "This is not my friend," he says. "This is not my best friend who I spent 18, 19 years of my life with. This is a lifeless corpse." So he pulled the paintings down. And what replaced them, slowly, almost accidentally, was something no one would call grief work. It looked, to the casual eye, like a party.

"I wanted to paint him larger, in oil, in colour. Oil, there's no other medium I find life in."

The studio he'd shared in Madhavaram, in North Madras, was an Anglo-Indian building with blue stained-glass windows and red oxide floors. These are not aesthetic choices; they are the material facts of a particular class of life in a particular part of the city. Manas grew up around red oxide, it was just the floor. But distance changes everything. When you leave a place, its textures become symbolic without your permission. The red oxide became a visual anchor. The blue glass became a quality of light that meant this room, this time, these people.

The people themselves are rendered without faces. Or nearly. "As soon as the face is there," he explains, "our instinct is to look at the face, to make connection to the identity of the person." He didn't want identity. He wanted something more stubborn: shared experience. At Art Mumbai, a mother and daughter stood before one of the works. The mother said it reminded her of her bachelor days. The daughter looked at the same image and said it looked like bad decisions. They were both right. That's the gap that good figurative painting can hold, the space between who painted it and who's looking at it.

This is also, quietly, a political act. Manas is deliberate about this, in a way that might surprise people who mistake joyfulness for naivety. He is acutely aware of what's happening in the world, the wars, the displaced, the art world's long romance with crisis as content. He struggled with whether this body of work had the seriousness to justify itself. "When you look at it, it does not feel like a serious work, it's just fun." And then: "I feel like being the most apolitical body of work, it becomes a very important political statement."

He's onto something. There is a particular exhaustion, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, that comes from art that only speaks in the register of catastrophe. The world burns; the gallery holds photographs of rubble. This is necessary. It is also, sometimes, a way of avoiding the harder question: what do we owe the ordinary moments? What does it mean to document, seriously, with oil and time and intention, a group of friends on a floor, doing nothing in particular, in a city that is very much alive?

"It was aware, but then at the same time, you have to look at what's happening in your immediate house."

The friend who died was the one who bought him canvas. Art school teachers in India are "barely paid anything," and it was this friend, who was not from the art world, who went to college with someone Manas met somewhere, who was connected to nearly everyone in that studio in the way that certain people are the magnetic centre of a group, who funded the practice. Who bought the wood for the stretchers. Who, in death, became the reason to finally work large, to finally work in oil, to give the work the scale it deserved.

There's a particular cruelty in that: that sometimes it takes losing someone to understand what they were sustaining. The studio full of IT professionals working on laptops while Manas built stretchers, "they would hold my stretcher wood while I cut them, help me stretch a piece of canvas, sometimes play with paint on the wall," this is not background colour. This is the actual fabric of an artistic life. The people who aren't artists but who make the artist possible.

He describes the studio with the tenderness of someone who didn't cherish it enough when he had it. The pai on the floor, the one piece of furniture, a paint bucket, holding a TV and a PlayStation. The garden in front, garden at back. Dogs. Cats walking in, eating food, staying awhile. Even a crow. "I always felt it like a building that's going to come down very soon," he says. "So I could do anything to it." Paints on the ceiling, on the floor. An empty canvas they all played on together.

When he lost the space, when he moved, when his friend died, when the group dispersed in the way groups do, what he lost was not just a building. He lost the archive. And so the paintings became an act of archiving, not in the documentary sense, but in the deeper sense: keeping something from disappearing completely, the way photographs can't, because photographs are too specific. They capture what something looked like. Paintings can capture what something felt like. "Life was fun every single day. That's what I wanted to show."

The show was never meant to be shown. That's worth sitting with. These paintings, finished in a day each, despite the medium, because Manas cannot sit with the same work across moods, were private objects. He was "possessive" of them. Then Ashvin Rajagopalan, curator at Ashvita's, caught a corner of one in a video call, asked what it was, and something shifted.

This is also how art works, sometimes. The private thing turns out to be the most universal. The work you made for no one turns out to be the work everyone can see themselves in.

Two weeks after the show closed, Ashvita's walls now hold another artist's world entirely. The red oxide floors exist only in canvas. The studio is still gone. And somewhere, a woman is thinking about her bachelor days, and her daughter is thinking about bad decisions, and both of them are right about the same painting.

That's the thing about rooms that witness us. They don't disappear when we leave them. They just move somewhere smaller, warmer, stranger, into the body, into the hand that holds the brush, into the work that outlasts everything.

Email: shivani@newindianexpress.com
X: @ShivaniIllakiya

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