Door to door

Krishnan’s paintings are aimed at bringing back memories from his childhood days that were spent in Kumbakonum,a village in Tamil Nadu. The doors,for him and his childhood friends were objects of wonder and surprise due to the mystery of what they held inside. His paintings mostly feature doors from the eighties and nineties with a lot of detailing. With a closer look,one can notice alphabets and randomly scribbled numbers on the doors which look like meaningless graffiti,but hold special significance for Krishnan. “Doors are important for our lives. Car doors,home doors,even eyelids are our doors from which we can see the world. I use details like corporation numbers in my paintings. The thing about the South,where I grew up,is that when the muncipality people would come to houses to give polio drops,they would mark the doors with some numbers. Even the people who came to give electricity scribbled some numbers on the doors. Every door has a separate identity due to these numbers,” says Krishna,who works with acrylic on canvas.

The walls that his paintings peek at through the doors are decorated with various posters of Tollywood and Bollywood movies; some of them even have brass vessels stacked in a corner. “Most of my paintings,where there is another window or door in the background that gives the view of other buildings and the sky,one can see crows perched on rooftops. Nowadays,days go by so fast,everyone is running against time,but back in the old days,people would regularly take out time and feed these crows,” says Krishnan.