(b. 1981, India)
Known for her unconventional applications of charcoal, Mahalakshmi Kannappan’s artistic practice challenges the traditional notions of medium and unearths the internal complexities of existence through material experimentation. With combined precision and intuition, she compels her medium of choice beyond the boundaries of medium and subject matter – creating obscure and unexpected yet striking compositions that straddle both the pictorial and sculptural.
Fascinated by the limitless possibilities and nuances in the “black” of charcoal – in its spontaneous and unpredictable reactions to her experimentations – Mahalakshmi Kannappan has developed her own abstract and bold yet somewhat minimalistic visual language and imagery. In her pieces, the forms, the objects, and the medium are more than tools of composition, but the subject of the works.
“Black is not the end,” she asserts. “It’s the beginning –
where light is born, where change happens.”
— Mahalakshmi Kannappan’s Exploration of Black as a Living Medium
Natasha Chawla
Returning Shadows: Fading at Dusk II
2024
Black Lime Plaster on Wood
102 x 112 x 8 cm
Returning Shadows: The Form a Dusk II shows an iteration of her observation of dusk’s light at different locations, capturing the subtle shifts in familiar shapes as shadows transform in the final moments between day and night and night fall.
To Renew
2024
Black Lime Plaster on Wood
34 x 40 x 3 cm
Mahalakshmi Kannappan, as a diasporic artist from India who is based in Singapore, has had to constantly navigate and negotiate with shifting social and cultural landscapes in her construction of identity and belonging.
For the artist, To Renew, symbolises this process of reassembling disparate shapes to create a harmonious whole.
To Renew VI
2024
Black Lime Plaster on Wood
37 x 37 x 3 cm
In the artist’s desire to capture and transform memories and ephemeral experiences into permanent forms, her pieces often reflect the underlying ambiguous, fleeting, and impermanent nature of these phenomena.
To Renew VI features different shapes assembled together to create a relief effect, where the layers enhance a sense of dimensionality in the work.
Kannappan’s work challenges perceptions of shape and surface, blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture and thus inviting her practice to be situated within discussions on minimal art in relation to the discourse on art and objecthood.
— Perpetual Shift (Gajah Gallery, 2024)
Michelle Ho
Contours of Change V
2024
Black Lime Plaster on Wood
20 x 30 x 3 cm
Assembled in a rectilinear form resembling a painting while subtly revealing its sculptural nuances, the composition of Contours of Change V considers the condition of wear, tear, and repair as the artist accentuates texture and alteration in the surface to suggest how micro elements of disruption can exist in gestures of repetition.
Aligned Imperfections IV
2024
Black Lime Plaster on Wood
55 x 67 x 5 cm
The accentuated shift in Aligned Imperfections IV, formed by the placement of equally measured plaster blocks in a grid, highlights how subtle disruptions can be retained within a uniform arrangement.
Mahalakshmi shares this view when she wrote an artist statement for a 2019 group exhibition: “when left on their own … [material] behaves and responds to stimuli in various ways. Some responses are unpredictable and uncontrollable. My works seek to identify, stimulate, amalgamate and distort materials to explore their responses.”
— Bringing Things Back to Life in Singular Moments (Gajah Gallery, 2020)
Tessa Maria Guazon
No. 04 Synergy of Surfaces
2024
Charcoal on Canvas
38 x 48 cm
Edges and surfaces are not demarcated or contained, but are instead marked by ridges and creases, in No. 04 Synergy of Surfaces. Not allowing the flat surface to limit her work, Mahalakshmi Kannppan has experimented with, and expanded, the limitations of charcoal to create three-dimensional imagery on canvas.
No. 05 Synergy of Surfaces
2024
Charcoal on Canvas
38 x 48 cm
Transforming the medium charcoal into varying consistencies gained Mahalakshmi Kannappan access to an expanded possibilities of texture and further pushed the material into sculptural proportions. This dynamism is evident in No. 5 Synergy of Surfaces, where a range of subtle differences in hue and tonal values can be discerned in the curious way that light interacts with the sculptural aspects of the surface.
