Narayanan Mohanan who creates life in his artistic works is renowned for his contemporary artistic views. He invents his subject for his work from socially relevant issues and matters of concern to the society. His concern for his fellow beings is reflected in his visual representations of real life issues. He is a Kochi based graphic artist and has a vast experience in the field of advertising. As a graphic artist and visual communicator he picks one of the most poignant episodes from the recent political realities of the country and gives it a visual representation.
The title of one of his works is ‘Freed(o)2m’. The reference is to the recent ‘gas tragedy’ in Gorakhpur where around 71 children died due to the oxygen supply failure. The national colour and its strength dissolve the way the bodies of the suffering people in India, the colours forming an ‘O’ and the Ashoka Chakra taking the shape of 2. The cry for Oxygen and the possible asphyxiation due to the lack of it is connected to Freedom and the lack of it by the artist. Also, using this minimal expression, the artist says that the country has been reduced to a ‘0’ by taking away the oxygen/freedom of people.
Narayanan Mohanan is a diploma holder in Software. He keeps a passion for fashion and also is fond of artivism, humanism, Conceptualism, Minimalism & Sarcasm. He has learnt art through self-guided learning with a dose of trial-and-error. He prefers to choose what to learn and when, and at what pace. He never followed a curriculum based study.
Narayanan‘s art has been planned and executed with the intention of being staged for the physical public domain. His work focuses on visual explorations of culturally significant data and he constantly seeks new ways to represent information to create connection, insight, narration and beauty. According to him childhood is considered to be the most blessed stage in a human life. Even though childhood is usually associated with exuberance and days of enjoyment, unfortunately for billions of children around the globe, due to the menace of childhood labor, the blissful world of childhood is sadly missing. Here Narayanan opines that Child is meant to learn and not to earn. and we cannot consider ourselves to be progressive and liberated unless and until we are able to break the shackles and free our society from the menace of child labor and thereby encouraging an environment in which every single child is able to enjoy the bliss of childhood. And of course we don’t deserve to celebrate children’s day if we can’t stop child labor.