For VISWANATH KUTTUM (b. 1988), drawing is a channel for expressing the intensity of his reflections and memories of his home town Port Blair, refracted through the urban environment of Delhi, where he now lives. Over years of experimenting with painting and sculptural installations, Kuttum has developed a unique medium with paraffin, beeswax, resin, linseed oil, zinc white and pigments. Coating surfaces – paper, canvas or wood – with this paste, he draws through a subtractive process until the composition emerges. The medium’s softness makes each mark irreversible and demands precision, so that the etching-like gesture becomes a meditative act – almost like a ritual. “Perhaps this fragile nature of my medium echoes the marginalised geographies I engage with, which are on the verge of potential erasure,” says Kuttum.

Kuttum’s visual vocabulary is deeply informed by the forested landscapes, flora and fauna of the Andaman islands, especially the goats central to the sacrificial folk rituals, and the skin tones of the local residents. These intermingle with his fascination with festive carnivals and the vernacular architecture of the village in coastal Andhra Pradesh, from where his father along with a few other families migrated to the Andamans around the mid-20th century. Ceremonial imagery, geometric structures and contorted bodies collapse into each other and are metaphorically reconstructed to produce a dreamlike reverie.

The artist is especially intrigued by the sacred stone ‘Ammoru’, worshipped in community festive rituals. Created by drawing an eye on a stone and often placed on a pot, it is carried by women to a shrine while a man navigates with his head covered in a handwoven bamboo basket with slits for the eyes. Kuttum is drawn to the philosophy of the ‘all-seeing eye’ as a call to consciousness – what we choose to see and what we ignore in plain sight. This imagery inspires the performing figures in frenzied poise that recur in his works, engaging the viewer in a silent dialogue – each gaze caught in that of others, yet unaware of being ‘looked at’.