黑料不打烊

The renaissance architect Leon Baptista Alberti began his famous treatise On Painting with the bold but absurd assertion that artists should only be concerned with the things that are visible. Although this limiting statement eventually led to the wonders of contemporary realism, by limiting art to representation and idealism, Alberti excluded the work of visionary artists who – since the first glimmerings of human consciousness flickered in Promethean minds – have made abstract, symbolic, and representational marks in their attempts to make the invisible visible, to give form to the numinous, and to illustrate the workings of the heavens. Of them, the Florida artist NFN Kalyan is the embodiment of a contemporary visionary painter. He is a seer of the unseen, a creative king of color, a bright oracle of the indiscernible realms of divine beings.

NFN Kalyan, Field Trip, Oil on Canvas, 20.5" x 30.5", 2025

In recent paintings the subject of his work has coalesced around imagery borne of the ancient Indian holy book, the Mahabharata, but there is also an element of contemporary anxiety and critique – in Field Trip, children from Shannon Hicks’ famous news photograph of the Sandy Hook school shooting are led by blue Micky Mouse cast as a diminutive Krishna; in his tragic Remembrance a man wrapped in the alienating headset of virtual reality kneels before a shop window empty of real goods and holding only an innocent child, but authentic connection between the two is hindered by the mediation of the mask, of digital media, and the glass; in his Icarus, Lord Hanuman sits nonplussed beside an Abu-Ghraib prisoner tied to a rooftop shed. Nevertheless, Kalyan said, “I think many artists try to be very political with work, very social justice, whatever, very specific. My work deals with life and humanity in the broadest terms. I’m trying to think of the history of the species and what the basic nature of ‘us’ is.”

NFN Kalyan, Remembrance, Oil on Canvas, 24.5" x 37", 2025

NFN Kalyan, Icarus, Oil on Canvas, 22" x 34", 2025

His unusual first name ‘NFN’ was given to him by the Department of Motor Vehicles during his application for a driving license when he was twenty-one – he had never signed anything except with his first name, so he decided to legally change it, minimizing his identity by using only the familiar ‘Kalyan.’ However, when he received his driving license, it was given to him with the initials N.F.N. “I asked ‘What’s that?’” explained Kalyan, “And they said, ‘You have to have a last name,’ so my first name had become my last name;” the clerk had written ‘No First Name’ in the preceding box, which was abbreviated to ‘N.F.N.’ This bizarre and bureaucratic fluke of simplification birthed his new identity with a simultaneous anonymity and complexity appropriate to his work.

NFN Kalyan, Duty and Consequence, oil on linen, 72” x 144” (triptych), 2019 

Kalyan’s brilliant paintings are packed with quotations from other painters and photographers. A four-armed version of one of Jeremy Geddes’ vintage Major Tom spacemen is prominent in Duty and Consequence, floating untethered and death-headed behind fragments of pictures by Kehinde Wiley, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Katsushika Hokusai, and Peter Paul Rubens. Lord Ganesh, the elephant headed Hindu god of prosperity who was born of Shiva’s laughter and became the remover of obstacles and deliverer of good fortune, rides a great wave of bodies as it breaks over the romantic princess knighting her heroic champion witnessed in Edmund Blair Leighton’s The Accolade.

Sampling is a pop-cultural theme Kalyan has enjoyed and repeated in his past work, and he is known for quoting and altering previous artists’ imagery. As precedents for his controversial appropriation of other artists’ work, he points to DJ’s digitally re-cycling music, and movie directors like clever Quentin Tarantino or subtle Martin Scorsese imitating previous films, using effective scenes as templates for their work.

NFN Kalyan, Creation Accusation (detail), Oil on Canvas, 72” x 232” (Nine Panels), 2020.

His immense Creation Accusation spreads across nine panels and completely fills the dining room of its owner’s Los Angeles home, like a mad art history lesson filled with layered figures from famous old master paintings and the excellence of superb quality 21^st century figuration – interacting with each other, altered, manipulated, and reinvented to create a new narrative only understood by the viewer, whose own set of references are the chaptered landmarks to the unfolded story suggested by the pictures. The center of the composition is filled with a portrait of a young African American borrowed and altered from a photograph called The New Crown – Kalyan explained this was a reference to humanity’s birthplace at the heart of the great continent; the satellite dish and the Chinese military installation is a reference to The Three Body Problem, the existential Amazon series based on the book by Chinese hard science fiction author Liu Cixin. Michelangelo’s God and Adam, from the panel in his Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco, appear at opposite ends of the chaos. “I’m very interested by the idea of God and Adam pointing at each other,” Kalyan said, “it’s an accusation: ‘You!’ ‘No, you!’ They’re pointing at each other… We have this question, why would God put us on earth, and all these bad things happen… and from God’s perspective he’s saying, ‘you did all that.’” Kalyan alters and critiques the narrative by separating God from his creation and flipping Adam and making him as blue as Krishna, next to the two spidermen. The painting is a spectacle, demanding attention, and filled with easter eggs of intriguing discoveries – each panel of it stands as a fabulous splash of complexity, and rewards close attention.

NFN Kalyan, Pope Innocent X After Velazquez After Bacon, Oil on Canvas, 60" x 40", 2025

By adapting the imagery of the past, Kalyan has inserted himself into the narrative of art history. With the scream and interference of his Pope Innocent X After Velazquez After Bacon he nods to the innovations of the eponymous masters, but, with his enthroned prelate fractured by shimmering digital fallout, this monkey headed Pope is determinedly contemporary. He said, “I wanted to get that glitchy, digital chaos that only exists in the past thirty years into that painting.” Rattling the woke theory of American academia, Kalyan forces the monumental papal painting into the dialogue of contemporary issues – his emulation of the referenced artists’ work casts the Hindu deity Lord Hanuman in the role of the Pope – presenting a delicious denial of the concealed orientalist racism of continental art theory which exoticizes people from non-Anglo cultures. Is Kalyan appropriating Western art into the Indian narrative, or appropriating Indian art into the Western narrative?

As well as subverting otherness and breaking elitist cultural conventions in brilliant style, Kalyan’s Pope also leads to a consideration of the controversial role of Artificial Intelligence in the creative process. To achieve the shimmering appearance of his Pope he made repeated iterations of the image, painting from a combination of them. “…Lately, instead of sampling with this new show I’ve been doing a lot of it with A.I..” he said, “It’s in the DNA of it.”

NFN Kalyan, Light in August, Oil on Canvas, 28.25" x 42", 2025

Alberti also complained that overwhelming a painting with an abundance of imagery was undignified, disapproving of artists who “in their desire to appear rich or to leave no space empty, follow no system of composition, but scatter everything about in random confusion with the result that their ‘historia’ does not appear to be doing anything, but merely to be in a turmoil.” Silly Alberti. This idea, too, is contradicted by the sublime and psychedelic aesthetic of our image-driven age, and if there is any artist perfectly capturing the overwhelming zeitgeist of the spectacular mood of the 21^st century, it is Kalyan. But, if his “everything all at once” mode deliberately overwhelms his willing audience with cascades of imagery requiring slow examination to comprehend its totality, he is also capable of soft seconds of great sensitivity and care – the profusion and excess of his most extravagant work is on hold in Light in August, which is a simple, beautiful image of a wakening dog caught in the chiaroscuro light of golden evening, centered on a trusting and loyal eye. A.I. haters will ask angrily if it was painted from a real dog or a generated image. Does it matter? Alberti knew all art was a counterfeit of the original. NFN Kalyan IS the real thing, an artist for our time, for our fractured moment.

NFN Kalyan’s Fugue is at Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts in Binghamton, New York, Friday, September 5 – Saturday, November 1.

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