Nangeli's Sacrifice Painting

T Murali is a whole time painter. He had done more than eghteen solo exhibitions of paintings in the last three years. And He is an author of an art book - "AMANA" , acollection of thirty five paintings and descriptions in Malayalam language, which was published in March, 2016. Artist T Murali's works explore the trajectory of hegemonic material violence in the tumultuous contexts of the cultural history and social formations in Kerala. He has painted the historic moments of subaltern revolt and resistance in south Travancore as in Channar Woman and also vividly depicted the mutilations and genocidal violence done on the body and bio power of the Avarna woman in Kerala by casteist patriarchy for almost a thousand years in the establishment of the Hindu Brahmanical cast system and its feudal patriarchal order here. His works also make visible the repressive violence and representational dilemmas involved in the traditionalist and elitist iconography of our prevalent world view and common sense. A scathing critique of popular religion and dogmatic faith in metaphysical and obscurantist discourses of the dominant order is also evident and visible in Murali's vivid visual idiom. The artist engage seriously with the contemporary idiom of visual arts and try to represent the struggle for a new visual language and expression from within the realm of the sign and the visual codes of local culture. In this sense the works are contemporary and vernacular at the same time. Contemporary in the sense of the themes and socio political issues presented and vernacular in the nuances of cultural location and signification. Through the depiction of the local and the vernacular he also trys to resist the Meta Narratives of the Nation and the hegemonic and oppressive cultural logic of the Nation State in particular. By foregrounding the human and the ethical within the minor and other these works resist the reinstatement and deification of local cultural elitism and neo Nationalisms or dominant religious revivalisms of the regional sort.