Free hand Noël Bonam at SPACE Gallery BY CHRIS THOMPSON

Noël Bonam’s ink drawing of the elephant-headed Ganesha pictures a god who is at once eternally hungry and yet, with his pleasant poise and a delicate blossom draped gracefully over his trunk, far from ravenous. His desire appears not as the insatiable sort that would drive one to violence and despair but, on the contrary, as a positive longing that can lead to provisional contentment; thus is his appearance, as Bonam tells us, "auspicious for all beginnings."

Brought to life in a weave of fine elegant ink lines, emerging out of a shimmering space flanked with ornamented borders, "Ganesha VI," like all of Bonam’s drawings, has a directness of approach that contrasts perfectly with the complexity of its themes of satiety and desire, and with his work’s broader engagement with, in his words, the "various cultural nuances of the Indian sub-continent." His work grapples with themes of home and family, tracing the ways in which everyday objects and activities take on a special, even spiritual, significance, mythological figures intermeshing with the fabric of daily life. Its quirkily sophisticated technical vocabulary balances a love of intricacy and improvisation, repetition of pattern and uniformity of line, cultural difference and that elusive thing called human nature. Entitled "Sumithra: a folk art exhibition of fine ink drawings by Noël Bonam," the show of his work at the SPACE Gallery manages refreshing accessibility without sacrificing richness of the visual experience or depth of thematic exploration.

"Walk around", Bonam’s introductory note asks us, "and examine the bluntness." What you see is what you see, and yet there’s still something more to be seen.

"Sumithra" is a word meaning "good samaritan" and "well-wisher" in Hindi. It was also the name of Bonam’s father, who died when Bonam was four years old and to whose memory the show is dedicated. Along with this dedication, in honor of the father/son bond, Bonam has donated the proceeds from the sale of his drawings to the annual Boys to Men Conference. He has, he says, found it meaningful to have the opportunity to bring these two aspects of his life together and thereby to invest in this community which, he says, has been such a welcoming and supportive one for him.

For the last two years — Bonam has lived in Portland only for three, during which time he has become an important voice in local cultural policy — he has been one of the organizers of the Boys to Men Conference. Since its first incarnation in November 2000, Boys to Men has sought to provide a forum that, bringing together men and boys of all ages, aims to "support positive, non-violent male development" by staging events, activities and dialogues that help participants find the tools to build healthy relationships.

Bonam speaks fondly about one such friendship that he had with the British artist Tom Sims, who he met years ago while living in Bournemouth, England. Bonam had been working in clay, watercolor, and ink when Sims introduced him to pyrography, a process of burning marks into a wooden surface. He was seduced by its combination of the delicacy of etching and the elemental forces of welding, and has continued working in this medium to this day. Its lessons remain present in his drawings’ keen sense of rhythm and balance.

Pyrography demands a blacksmith’s attunement to time, temperature, and the texture of the materials. The heat of the stylus has to be monitored and its impact upon the wooden surface predicted. It must be hot enough to burn into the wood, but not too hot, or else the stylus itself will burn; too little heat and pressure and the marks don’t register, too much and the burn in the wood becomes a charred hole.

In 2000, Bonam was commissioned to create a series of pyrographs for an exhibition at L’Alliance Française in Hyderabad, India, to commemorate their twentieth anniversary. He created 18 in total — most remained in the institution’s collection, but Bonam held on to a few (pictured, with Bonham) — a series of faces emerging from the wooden surface, each finding their origin in, and orientation from, the knot in the wood that serves as the figure’s eye, images that seem to hover between substance and idea.

The pyrographs play a pivotal role as experiments in dealing with the kinds of accidents that are as integral to wood and stylus, or ink and paper, as they are to life itself. Rather than try to avoid accidents of marking or measuring, Bonam’s pyrographs permit them, even encourage them, and find ways to put them to work, to carefully manage them.

The rhythms of the marks exceed the rectangle within which they began, carving into the substance of the wooden page, working at once through its grain and in resistance to it. From this dialogue between the original grain and the introduced burn, there emerges a nascent pattern, vibrant and unpredictable despite its apparent clarity and stability, that holds our attention in much the same way as the mesmerizing and complex moving skin of the ocean, stretching and buckling under a calm sky. Leaving aside the grid — the modernist matrix that haunts many artists working in two-dimensional media — they negotiate between the flat horizontal expanse of the wooden surface and its paper-thin depth, cautiously but insistently building themselves into a force that moves out and beyond the frame.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com

"Sumithra: a folk art exhibition of fine ink drawings by Noël Bonam" shows at the SPACE Gallery, in Portland, through July 31. Call (207) 828-5600.