LURU Hangs w/ painter Devi Seetharam

Painting is pretty political.

Walking into the duplex apartment home-studio of the painter Devi Seetharam, were immediately met with work-in-progress canvases from one of the most discussed exhibits from the fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. These are large strikingly painted canvases of groups of men dressed in kasavu mundus. “The series Brothers, Fathers and Uncles was actually born – over a decade ago in 2016, well before the Biennale in 2022,” says Devi, over cups of coffee and bowls of mixed nuts.

That year in 2016, Devi moved from Abu Dhabi to Melbourne, she remembers “trying to look for inspiration, attempting to connect to the city” but instead “ended up referring to my sense of home, identity and what it meant to me,” she recalls. As she was processing this idea of Keralam as her home, “what stood out as most jarring was this notion of patriarchy” and “how do I articulate it.”

Dress code

Devi is certain “the visual came quite instantly.” Initially, it was meant as an illustration of men gathered wearing the kasavu mundu, white cotton fabric trimmed with glittering gold, the traditional textile of Kerala draped by both men and women. Her early ideas were to channel her “discomfort with the mundu in itself, my notions of it being some form of posturing, a kind of white-washing of some cultural issues or whatnot,” she explains. While “the visual was quite stark” Devi went through a whole process of “how do I actually execute it?”

“It started out multi-coloured,” she says, taking us through the making of the first painting in this series, which took two years to complete. First, she got her “ex-husband and his friends” to model in mundus on the balcony for her Melbourne home. She had them “constantly moving so I got different angles and postures from them,” she says.

She then cut out individual figures from the photographs, placing them in different combinations to eventually create the compositions of her painted figures. Her figures are flat, cropped at the waist and have dark skin, these choices were made because she doesn’t want us to identify with any of the individuals. “It’s me really amassing one section of society and saying: look at this right? How men can go anywhere in public, gather together, talk for two seconds and become besties whereas it’s much harder for women,” she says. “And I think bringing in individual elements that speak to other power dynamics and things [even between these men] I don’t want...it isn’t the point of this body of work,” she adds.

Erase all doubt

While working out the composition, Devi was also thinking about “how do I actually treat the canvas?” A long period of experimentation that started out multicoloured “but then I tried to achieve translucency on the acrylic without the right techniques,” she says. At first, she was “slathering paint and wiping it off” and then she began “to hit it with sandpaper – wrapped around three fingers – after four layers of raw umber and 46 coats of really diluted acrylic paint. “And that’s how this texture and grain came across in the work and I really enjoyed it,” she says. And over the next few years, she began to formalise the steps to be able to control the process. “The less I sandpaper is where the shadows form and the more I sandpaper is where the highlights form.”

Devi imbues her paintings with this sense of timelessness through this treatment of her canvas but also with her choice of background and the other elements that pepper the frame. “There isn’t much happening in the background” because Devi wanted to break away from “the most immediate association with Keralam, it is green, lush and vibrant,” she explains. “I felt this [series] was more of a critique and I wasn’t trying to celebrate the richness in a way. I was actually drawing upon how Kerala being a tropical state is just really tired, weathered, and worn,” she says. “I wanted to try and capture those textures and surfaces – peeling paint and rain-streaks. I’ve felt that this whole sandpapering process and the blotchy way in which I treat my background has mimicked that stone-concrete sort of feel.”

Timelessness or “this occupation of space or entitlement to space” as something that has been occurring for years and will for years to come is denoted by the flowers in various stages from fresh to wilting strewn on the ground. While there’s critique powering the work, it is executed with great respect too. “There’s dignity in these figures, I’m not trying to strip away dignity but I’m also saying there’s something amiss here and it’s not cool.”

Follow Devi’s practice here.

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LURU Hangs with... is a monthly LURU Newsletter series which takes you behind the processes and pleasures of the city’s artists.