Beyond the dimensions of time and space

R M Palaniappan's journey into this world of lines began in 1975, when he moved from the small town of Devakottai to Chennai to study architecture. However, he joined the College of Arts and Crafts instead, a shift that transformed the trajectory of his creative pursuits.

Line, its geometry and beyond, is the lifeline of the creative world of Chennai-based artist R M Palaniappan, whose oeuvre traverses the intersection of science, memory, philosophy, and flight. Trained as a printmaker and painter, Palaniappan’s work brings to life Paul Klee’s observation: A line is a dot that went for a walk.

“I cannot separate science, art, and philosophy, because I think they are intertwined,” says Palaniappan, who studied mathematics. These subjects continue to influence his life and work.

His journey into this world of lines began in 1975, when he moved from the small town of Devakottai to Chennai to study architecture. However, he joined the College of Arts and Crafts instead, a shift that transformed the trajectory of his creative pursuits.

In those early days, he created figurative works and aspired to paint like the old masters, whose reproductions had deeply inspired him.

But in 1978, he was given a classroom assignment to create a composition without reference. Unsure of what to make, he was struck by a spiral staircase he encountered at a local hotel. “I asked myself: if there were no connection between the two steps, what would happen? Why doesn’t a step fall? I felt it was flying. That’s when I realised there is a kind of density in the air… something that holds it all together,” Palaniappan recalls.

That spiral staircase inspired his first major work, Dancing Steps of My Birthday. While working on it, he also created other pieces featuring steps and architectural forms, including one titled Black Steps to Hell. The idea of the infinite line continues to inspire him. His latest exhibition at Nature Morte gallery in Delhi is titled Finite and Infinite, while his recent retrospective in Chennai was called Mapping the Invisible. For Palaniappan, who also served as the regional secretary of the Lalit Kala Akademi, the concept of infinity is deeply significant.

A closer observation of his work reveals how his engagement with infinity also challenges conventional notions of time and space. “When I was very young, there was an old chair in my house that only my grandfather used. After he went in for dinner in the evening, I would sit in that chair in the open courtyard and gaze at the vast sky. At that young age, I always wondered what lay beyond it. Even now, that question stays with me: What is behind that? What is infinity?” he muses. Palaniappan's works, thus, break the dimensions of time and space and challenge the notion of linearity. It’s this philosophical grounding that gives his paintings a Taoist dimension.

While most of his compositions involve combinations of straight and curved lines, certain works, like those in the series New Berlin-On Process, created after his visit in 1999, show a different approach. Inspired by the reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin, which once housed the German Parliament and was captured by Soviet forces during WWII, Palaniappan was moved by the interaction between past and present. At the site, surrounded by construction machinery and tourists snapping photographs, he too began to take photos, walking forward and backwards, almost as if sketching on the floor space. “I felt like I was drawing alongside others. I wanted to document that moment in a set of drawings, and I placed a red line on top of each print in the series to represent my presence in the composition,” he explains.

His works also carry a strong cartographic element, an interest that took flight, quite literally, during his first air travel, to New York City in 1990. “When a flight takes off, the mapping of the land below becomes incredibly important. Since then, I have flown hundreds of times. Each time, I look down and observe how the land beneath changes, how cultural and social practices shape space. This perspective has significantly altered the dimensions and the visual aspect of my paintings.”