About Narayan Bhattathiri and his
Works:
Narayana Bhattathiri is a malayalam caligraphy artist, who has exhibited his
works in India and abroad.
His workshops were organized at:
Kochi Biennale 2016-17,
Callifest, Navi Mumbai,
Trivandrum, Kochi, Thrissur and
Kozhikode.
He was the Festival Director of the First National calligraphy Festival of
Kerala in 2019.
Bhattathiri is the receipient of the Jikji Excellence Award in International
Calligraphy for 2017 and 2018.
Calligraphy work permanently exhibited in the Calligraphy Stone park, Harbin,
China.
A Novel based calligraphy series (30 works) permanently exhibited in Thrazak,
Palakkad, Kerala, India.
He is a regular participant at the International TypoDay Conferences for the
past couple of years, and has been part of various upcoming calligraphy
workshops all around the country.
Bhattathiri's Calligraphy:
In Malayalam, the romance with the alphabet has a long history; it can be found
in the various palm leaf manuscripts, and later in early stone types, block
prints etc. before it blossomed in print. Written, painted and printed words
are a ubiquitous presence in Kerala; our public spaces are inundated with
words; there are graffiti on all the walls, posters and billboards on the
pillars and posts stare at us from all around. With the apparently varied
‘choice’ of fonts and the ‘freedom’ to adapt and adopt, the encounter with the
shape and size, gravity and lightness, tone and tenor of the alphabet became
mechanical and ‘ordinary’, over the years. Bhattathiri’s word art is an attempt
to re-enchant the romance with alphabets, reinvigorating the encounter with new
energies, aesthetics and playful flights.
This exhibition presents a miniscule selection from the thousands of titles
that Bhattathiri has designed and drawn over the last four decades. He brings
to Malayalam alphabet art a new vigour and endless innovations, by working his
way through the contours and margins, the twists and turns, the dots and vowls
of Malayalam alphabets. He recreates the awe and wonder of that primal
encounter between meaning and word, the abstract signification and the concrete
form and shape of the alphabet. His art practice is one that works with,
through and around the tense and arbitrary, but deeply resonant relationship
between the word and its meaning, the alphabet and its sound.
Never a conformist to any style or school, he is vibrantly eclectic in his
approach to his art of shaping and moulding alphabets, curling and
straightening, flourishing and chiseling them into affects, meanings, emotions,
always creating, a visual impact of a visceral and striking kind. In this
process, he freely plays with forms and styles – sometimes they are minimal,
muted and rigid, other times, flowery and flamboyant, emotional and loud.
If one browses through the thousands of word designs created by Bhattathiri,
one will be astounded by their variety. His designs approach and negotiate with
the alphabet in a profound manner; alphabets and words are not mere potential
objects of ‘beauty’ or defined functionality for him; instead his art intensely
engages with the meanings, sign values, sound, genre (story, novel, film), and
space (magazine, book, paper, poster..); these factors decide the size, shape,
strokes, texture, and medium of his art work. Looking at his works, one feels
the word-forms emerging out of meanings, movements, sound, affects, emotions,
bhava and rasa associated with them.
He uses the alphabet styles of various languages and cultures – their shape,
size, flow, serifs, ascenders, descenders, stems, finials, apex, brackets,
leaps and loops, to adopt, coax and caress them into Malayalam alphabets. As a
result, one can find in his work traces of postures and slants, the flows and
joints of Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Hindi, etc; they are employed to animate
words to resonate with their cultural/linguistic roots and to make them
converse with Malayalam. Likewise, his ambigrams are ‘alphabetic flights of
imagination’, they are complex and fascinating creations that combine meaning
and form in inimitably playful ways.
Bhattathiri’s words and alphabets rain, burn, flow, flicker, fly, fall, slide,
float, frown, smile, giggle, ponder, worry and flutter, in tune with the
trajectories of the denotations and connotations, that illuminate and ignite
their semiotic, indexical and symbolic energies.
Three of Narayana Bhattathiri's
Malayalam Calligraphy Works:
A few links to read further about his works:
His beautiful malayalam calligraphy works
have featured in movies, and even recently in the Calligraphy event
dedicated to the National Anthem
Kalakaumudi news report about
the Calligraphy event dedicated to the National Anthem , can be viewed at
the following link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al-wFCU2P0g&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1E-6pvMsC6uURk0qE9aSowwQsXvz7wp2DJHgkk1I6YCrTOid4R0IB5_bw
He also did calligraphy works based on the
novel at Thasrak, the village in Palakkad made famous by OV Vijayan’s
seminal work, Khasakkinte Ithihasam, to mark the golden jubilee year
of the book. For more details, please read the news by The Hindu:
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