Speaking in tongues

D Ebenezer Sunder Singh speaks of energy and the super-man in his art

There is a darkness that prevails, punctuated by sparkling brightness that is, to put it mildly, startling. The work of D Ebenezer Sunder Singh in his latest show - called Thus Spake Zarathustra - at the Pundole Art Gallery is a study in contrasts, of flashes of ‘lightning out of the dark cloud’, shades of grey occasionally interrupted with vivid splashes of pink, orange, lime green and blue. His charcoal drawings have a depth, a mystery, almost frightening in the tortuous contortions of the human figures and fantastical in their scope of perception of a world that cannot be completely understood.

“In my work I have a physical and a metaphysical element,” Ebenezer explains, “like the figure of a man with babies around him, one lying on his hand, or a man falling with a fetus held in his splayed fingers.” The drawings, all in shades of black, “remain unlit. I don’t mean black as in darkness,” he says, “only a gradation from black to white – black needs to be worked to create the different shades,” the varying intensity. And he is working with a limited medium, “so it is not easy”.

But the works do not derive from a tortured soul, one suffused with darkness, he is quick to point out. When he paints in colour, “I use very bright hues. And my drawings, even in blacks, are very light related.” What he did was “to make this metaphysical thing work in light. And in this show, the light effects work very well in the sculpture – there are bright hues, with sequins and beads thrown all over.”

The idea of the super-man is strong in Ebenezer’s work. In fact, his inspiration comes from Nietzsche, whose book Thus Spake Zarathustra defines the concept in ‘I want to teach men the sense of their existence, which is superman…as lightning out of the dark cloud.’ The artist believes that this definition could be used to describe his work, as “a contemplation of myself, my energy growth. Nietzsche said there is no god to help man; only super-man, or Zarathustra, can help man. The saviour can only be a super-man.” This ethos is captured in his Superman sculptures, where tiny gold-painted, bead-dotted elephants are held, one tumbling over the other, in huge black, sequin-splashed hands. “There is some sort of energy between my hands. I articulate it with these images. The elephant is a symbol of energy as well.”

Heads are a refrain in the sculptures on show. And tongues are a prominent feature of each, as is seen in Tongues, an installation of 15 lime-green heads, each with a tongue of a different colour sticking out of its mouth. According to Ebenezer, “The tongue is a sensory code, and the head is a connotation, of speaking in tongues. The work, my thought, is about words, communication, and sensual and sense-related communication at that.” In Sky, that tongue is elongated, just a hairsbreadth away from touching the ceiling. The images are “intense”, and the artist is “trying to bring their reasons for existing to the fore as subtle symbols”. In Hair Grows, he speaks of a “contemplation of life and death, of dead cells growing. It is a sort of very fundamental question in life – life goes on and hair keeps growing, even as you cut it, even after death. It is an intense question on life.”

The sequins and beads are indeed novel, though Ebenezer says that “I have been using sequins for a while now, even on my canvases – as I paint, I throw them on top, paint over them, and then throw on more. This time I am using them on sculpture and the sculptures come out of my drawings.” For him, it is all about the “contrast between my dark drawings and the sculptures that are very bright and light.” The sequins catch the light and create more scintillations that add more depth to the darkness of the hands, the heads, the charcoal drawings.

All the figures that he creates are male. “It’s because I am male, so I show the male body,” Ebenezer explains. “I view the world through myself, I understand the world through my understanding of myself, my world, my education, my own being and energy.” In his work, “there is more of Ebenezer there in the idea of the person I draw or sculpt. My interpretation is with reference to myself.” This post-modern philosophy, essentially one of deconstruction, implies that “all interpretations are valid. You cannot make someone understand something from his point of view, but only from your own.”

And in that interpretation, Ebenezer makes his point. As a man, looking for super-man.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, Pundole Art Gallery, till May 31