MURALIDHARAN.K

K. Muralidharan [1954] markedly works with iconic images be it the Kamadhenu, elephant Devi, or other deities. His works germinate numerous figures and images that surround the main iconic form as an effulgent halo. His mythic imagination is rooted in the philosophy of his culture, but has advanced the same by demystifying them, evacuating it of sanctity to place them within the postmodern realm. The evacuation of the sacred from the modern and its secularization within the realm/arena of mass and popular culture gives it a status of superficiality and fragmentation, since certain iconic forms are removed and playfully melded to create a mass appeal. It within this realm that Muralidharan oeuvre is identified as integral to collective consciousness. This then becomes his constructed vision through dialectic of past and present. Through the insertion of popular images common in illustrated folk tales for children as the double trunk elephant, Kamadhenu, among many others, Muralidharan is contemporarising and secularizing his personally evolved imagery to mark it as pop or indicative of mass culture. They translate as postmodern in his conflation of iconic imagery through wit and parody and implicated with kitschy colours of popular and mass culture. His surfaces inscribed with varied miniscule imagery and the Tamil script is Post-Paniker in character.