Pramod Neelakandan

Pramod Neelakandan paints the conversation between people and the living world, and he rarely lets either side win. Born in 1976 in Kozhencherry, a village in Kerala, he came to art before he came to any classroom, teaching himself through the discipline of traditional mural painting - the temple art of flat, jewelled colour and patient, certain line. Oils on canvas followed, then murals proper, and today his contemporary paintings carry that whole journey inside them. You can see the mural tradition in everything he makes: figures outlined with calm precision, colour laid down flat and unblended, green given the run of the canvas. But the subjects are his own. A man balanced in a twisting blue tree. A figure in meditation with birds resting on every open palm. A woman whose body dissolves into jasmine. His people are never above nature and never apart from it, they are simply in it, the way the rest of us keep forgetting to be. Every work is painted once and owned once. If one of them holds your gaze a moment longer than you expected, that is the conversation starting.