Jose Dominic of CGH Earth debuts as an artist at The Plav, his new gallery in Kochi

Monalisa is an installation at Jew Town’s newest art gallery, The Plav, christened so by the founder, Jose Dominic. The former Managing Director and CEO of the CGH group says the name, with a dash of amusement tinged with mischief. Hold your horses before you go imagining a mysterious beauty with an enigmatic smile. Monalisa is made of wood, or rather the root of a tree; its imperfections exposed, despite the smooth sheen, showing off the uneven surface of a cross-section of the excavated root. 

It is one of a series of wooden artworks on display at Counting the Rings of Time curated by Sumesh Manoj Sharma. 

The Plav in Jew Town, barely 500-odd metres from the Jewish synagogue in Jew Town, Mattancherry, Kochi, was a godown in another lifetime, acquired by Jose Dominic. In its current avatar, it is hard to imagine its past life. As he shows the works displayed in the rectangular space that seems to tunnel into the roadside, much like the other buildings there, he narrates a story. It is about the mahogany tree his father, Dominic Joseph, planted sometime in the 1940s, close to their ancestral house in Pala. 

The tree flourished near the house, its branches and roots growing close to the house. 

However, in 2018, Jose Dominic learned that the more than 70-year-old tree was rotting from the roots, posing a risk to the building. With no other option but to cut it, local woodcutters/carpenters were called. But there was a problem. 

“The logistics of moving a whole cut-down tree were not feasible, so I asked the woodcutter to cut the tree into pieces,” he says. As the wood was being cut into rings, he saw a rare beauty emerge. In the rings, and in the natural ebb and flow of its grain, he saw art in the wood. Then the pandemic came; Jose asked the woodcutters to keep working. 

To a question about how the pieces came to be, he says, “At the time, none of us knew what we were doing. Initially, they were looking at making things of utility, but having seen the Biennale and the kind of works or art that was there…” The implication being that creativity need not be rigid.

“We had no clue what we were doing or even expected to do. Jose sir told us to keep doing what we were doing. So we would experiment in ways we knew how,” echo PK Vasudevan and Sreedharan Achari, the woodcutter and the carpenter who collaborated with Jose Dominic on the show. Sreedharan Achari was used to making furniture; this was something new and different. This was no indiscriminate hacking, says Vasudevan. “Looking at the works now, we understand that we were also creating art with Jose sir,” they say, happy with how the collaboration has come out.

“Vasudevan and Sreedharan had two people each on their teams — that is six people for three years. That is a lot of money. They asked me, ‘Do you know what you are doing?’ I didn’t know; I just said, ‘Let’s make some art!’ Now that they are in this shape, mounted on the wall, they said that it is now beginning to make some sense, but they are not entirely convinced,” Jose says with amusement. 

He acknowledges that he has been working jointly with them, nudging them, being the disruptor.

Apart from the slices of tree trunks, which found new life as framed works, there are roots and stumps that have become sculptures. The wood comes from a variety of trees like jackfruit, wild jack (anjili), mahogany, white teak (venthek) and other trees indigenous to Kerala. Jose Dominic clarifies that no trees were cut for this purpose; he harvested parts of trees, like roots and trunks that others in the area cut down. While a lot of the wood has been used, he says three sheds worth of sawn trees remain.

“These were farm-grown, extricated only when they were cut down. I would get these dug up with JCBs, the huge roots of trees that were left behind. I have not interfered with anything,” he says. He talks about sheds filled with pieces of trees. The wood is weathered - air-dried- before it becomes art. 

Jose Dominic is very visibly satisfied with the outcome. “We have not designed them. What we get is what you get. If there is rot, we remove that part, and we get what remains. ” 

Though the plan was to confine the art gallery to the first floor and showcase the furniture line, Madukka Live Edge, on the ground floor, “the art filled up the entire space,” he says. A storeroom adjacent to the gallery will be his studio space. He tells of a bunch of books from 60 years ago he found in the library back home. “Written in them was ‘presented to Jose Dominic for art.’ I used to do knife work with oil paints. Now I have lost touch, or even the confidence. Now I am going to learn and do it again.” 

He says it will be his “private space, which nobody else will see” as he practises his art.  

A chartered accountant, he was working in Mumbai when his father, Dominic Joseph, asked him to return home and join the family business. He was 28 then; a year later, his father retired. For the next 40 years, Jose Dominic helmed the company until he retired in 2018.  “When I retired, my doctor told me that to be in good health, post-retirement, I should not only be engaged but that I should be challengingly engaged. He said, ‘You must have tension.’ So now I am going about picking ‘tension’!” 

The show, on at The Plav, concludes on November 30