A friend once told me: speak to the art, not the artist. I was able to put perspective to that only after I broke that rule. Talking to the artist should have killed the mirage I'd built around his work. Instead, it did something better — it showed me the work was never a fixed thing to begin with. Two years ago, I first saw his paintings at Veda Gallery, and that encounter began my slow education in looking. Since then I've learned to sit with speculation instead of rushing past it toward meaning.

What our conversation gave me was this: understanding abstract art isn't a discovery, it's a mirror. What we see in it is shaped by what we've lived. He put it in terms I hadn't considered — that making the work and receiving it are two ends of the same exchange, energy given and energy taken, neither created nor destroyed, only passed on.

Nihilism or Cynicism?

He holds his commercial and personal motives apart with unusual clarity, letting them run as parallel tracks rather than forcing them into conflict. His paintings often come in two parts — not opposites, but two versions of something similar enough to sit side by side without resolving into one meaning. There's no single key he's built the work around, and that absence is deliberate: it leaves room for the viewer to work. What struck me most was his equanimity — the calm of someone who understands exactly how the world runs, and exactly where he stands in it.

What Is Art?

"Art is nothing," he said. Perspective is what makes it something.

Geometry, Underneath Everything

He works mostly on paper, across different mediums, always returning to geometry. I asked the obvious question — is the math behind the art, or the art behind the math? He didn't take either side. To him, everything is geometry, not just the line and the circle we're taught to recognize as such. Every form carries a formula; we've simply only been educated on the simplest ones. A portrait, he said, has a formula of its own — we just haven't been taught to see it. That reframed the question I'd asked. It was never math versus art. It was that math is one of the languages art speaks in, and most of us only know the alphabet.

Knowledge

We talked at length about the difference between knowledge earned through learning and knowledge handed down through education. I left with a premise I'm still sitting with: education, in its efficiency, quietly starves the curiosity that made learning worth doing in the first place. His idea of the hidden formula in a portrait was the clearest evidence of this — it's not something a curriculum teaches you to look for. It's something you find only by staying curious past the point where formal learning stops.

Questioning and Acceptance

He questions everything, and that habit is the real thread under all of it. Take something as basic as color. We agree white is white. Nobody asks why #FFFFFF earned that name — we simply inherited a shared vocabulary through a common curriculum, and the admission we've all come to is what lets us talk to each other at all. Useful, but arbitrary. Fine, when the stakes are a color.

But the same mechanism runs underneath far less obvious ground — good and bad, manners, God. We inherit these too, as consensus rather than proof, and mistake the consensus for the proof because everyone around us has made the same admission. Selvaraj's questioning doesn't stop at where it's comfortable. It goes as far into the obscure as it does into the technical — which is why a portrait having its own hidden formula and God being an unexamined inheritance are, to him, the same kind of question asked twice.

And in questioning it all, he breaks out of the belief bubbles most people never notice they're standing inside. But breaking out creates its own reckoning: he still has to make peace with the bubbles he's no longer inside of — the ones everyone around him continues to live within, unquestioned. His equanimity isn't the absence of that tension. It's what it looks like to hold it without needing to resolve it.

Which brings the exchange full circle. Energy isn't created or destroyed, only transformed — and neither, it turns out, is form. A line becomes a circle becomes a face becomes a feeling, each one just geometry wearing a different formula. What I saw in his work wasn't fixed either. It was a mirror, catching whatever I brought to it, and giving it back changed.