Take on Art (vol. IV)

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the painter in Swaminathan is a peculiar animal: I have known it for nearly four decades and yet I cannot draw up its features. So I find myself in the same situation as that of Sonya Marmaladova in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. She looks up to Raskolnikov in the hour of her despair. In summing up the scene Dostoevsky speaks of the need for an insatiable compassion: it is as though compassion were a kind of hunger which the presence of Raskolnikov nourishes beyond saturation...

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Swaminathan's colour geometry of mountains has a peculiar pictorial grammar. In them, the content becomes form. The mountain is defined by its magnitude a feeling of largeness which seems incommensurable to the dimension of an easel painting. The order of largeness is, however, made commensurable with the dimension of a bird that is, in any way, at much higher elevation. The bird, metaphorically speaking, transcends the largeness of the mountain; it appears absolutely large. Thus the content - the idea of mass and quantity is presented not in terms of Albertian quantities of vision but as a noumenal agency of intuition.

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The truth, in the colour-geometric configurations of incomparable magnitudes, is simple to grasp. The sublime, in comparison with which all the rest appears small, proceeds intuitively and aesthetically through the imagination of the eye alone. Or, as Kant might like to put it: the evaluation of sizes of natural objects is, in the last instance, aesthetic - that is subjective. The fundamental evaluation of size is subjective because the measure is the human body... The desire for a world other than he was born into made him in his youth a utopain socialist, a trade unionist, a journalist. Did not Marx say: Philosophers have interpreted the world, it is time to change it? But a desire for a self-made world led him to painting. Which in long years of struggle became his Other. The Other for Swaminathan has always been to paint a revolution which in turn revolutionised his painting.

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