Mapping the Infinite: Akkitham Narayanan’s geometry of memory

In the charged cultural quarter of Lalit Kala Academy, where New Delhi’s histories overlap and collide, Geometries of the Infinite arrives as a pause rather than a proclamation. The exhibition, a major retrospective of Akkitham Narayanan curated by Anahita Daruwala Banerjee and presented by Artworld, gathers decades of work by an artist who has spent a lifetime thinking through form, repetition, and the unseen architectures that shape human experience.

Geometries of the Infinite traces how Akkitham Narayanan turned geometry into a site of inward reflection

Born in Kerala in 1939, trained in Chennai, and later immersed in the rigour of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Narayanan occupies a rare position within Indian abstraction. His paintings refuse spectacle. Instead, they ask for time, patience, and an attunement to subtle shifts of surface and rhythm. Geometry, in his hands, becomes less a system than a lived condition.

“When I look back, I don’t see my time in Chennai and Paris as two separate worlds,” Narayanan reflects. “They slowly flowed into each other.” That flow lies at the heart of this exhibition. Early memories of kolams drawn at dawn, temple gopurams, ritual diagrams, and festival rhythms sit alongside the discipline of European draftsmanship and monumental art. Paris sharpened his sense of structure, but it never displaced the intuitive knowledge formed in India. “The discipline of European training gave me tools, while my Indian roots gave me meaning,” he says.

The works assembled at Lalit Kala Academy trace this long conversation across decades. Paintings and works on paper move between tightly ordered grids and more fluid configurations where shapes appear to drift, merge, and reassemble. Triangles, circles, and sinuous lines recur, though never as fixed symbols. They behave instead like memories resurfacing, altered by time and distance.

Narayanan’s surfaces carry their own histories. Built through thin layers of paint, then cut back and incised, they hold a tactile density that feels almost bodily. “When I begin a work, I don’t start with a big theory in my head,” he explains. “I start with the material in front of me. I look at it, I touch it, I spend time with it.” Layering, for him, resembles remembering, while carving becomes an act of uncovering rather than erasure. “When I carve into the surface, I am searching for what is already inside, hidden beneath the layers.”

Curator Anahita Daruwala Banerjee approached this retrospective with an acute awareness of history. As a third-generation custodian of Artworld, she grew up around Narayanan’s work and the reverence it commanded within the gallery’s ecosystem. Yet she was equally determined to resist nostalgia. “I didn’t want this exhibition to feel like an exercise in heritage,” she says. “I wanted to experience Akkitham anew, in my own way.”

That process unfolded over years of visits to the artist’s studios in Kerala and Paris, and long conversations that moved beyond formal analysis. Rather than arranging the exhibition chronologically, Banerjee organised it around emotional and philosophical currents. The result feels closer to an inner landscape than a career survey. Large canvases sit beside intimate studies, revealing how intensity persists across scale.

“What surprised me most was not one dramatic, hidden body of work,” Banerjee notes, “but how consistent Narayanan’s questions have been over six decades.” Early concerns with space, repetition, and restraint return again and again, each time altered by confidence and reduction. Smaller, rarely seen drawings expose moments of doubt and hesitation, underscoring an artist who never settled too easily into a recognisable manner.

The exhibition design reinforces this sense of open inquiry. Light and shadow are allowed to play across surfaces, and viewer movement becomes part of the spatial logic. Meditative sessions and guided tours further extend the encounter beyond looking alone. For Banerjee, these elements are not add-ons but integral to the work’s philosophy. “Akkitham’s work isn’t something you just look at, it’s something you spend time with,” she says. “I wanted the exhibition to reflect that sense of contemplation rather than present his work in a purely conventional manner.”

Standing before Narayanan’s paintings, one feels less addressed than accompanied. The works do not instruct. They wait. In later pieces especially, form is pared back to near elemental clarity, a shift the artist himself recognises. “I find myself returning most often to the works where I stripped things down the most,” he says. “They show me how slowly I was learning to let go.” These pared surfaces trust space and reduction, allowing viewers to project their own states of mind.

For Narayanan, that exchange completes the work. “The shapes are like a mirror that doesn’t show your face, only your state of mind,” he observes. “The dialogue I’m inviting is a quiet one, not with me, but with themselves.”

Geometries of the Infinite offers a different proposition: it asks what happens when geometry stops organising the world and starts listening to it. Within the walls of Lalit Kala Academy, Akkitham Narayanan’s lifelong inquiry unfolds as a measured, generous invitation to slow down and inhabit the spaces between line, colour, and thought.

February 4-10. At Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi.

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