And paintings and drawings of his 30-year retrospective, currently on view at the National Gallery of Modern Art, are just that -- a blur of movement along the circular walls of the gallery. All abstracts, his paintings are made of lines which move ahead in all directions -- opening, closing, receding into the deep and stirring sideways. But there are no circles in his works, because for Viswanadhan it is a shape which restricts and contains but doesn't release, and his paintings are like his life. "My art is my journey," he says.

Based in Paris since 1968, Viswanadhan was born in Kerala and his earlier works, more dense and compact than the later ones, drew inspiration from the colourful line drawings of rural Kerala. Viswanadhan decided to study artfrom Madras College of Arts and Crafts in days, "when an artist was considered some sort of a strange dog", and except for occasional forays into a society which lived by the rule of the circle, life on the sidelines was a tough choice.

Aware of that fact, his teacher at the school doled out some practical advice: why not make some handicrafts which are easier to sell and live off that money. "Some of us did just that and were very happy with what we had earned. We thought this could become a feasible long term option," he says.

So one punctuation mark in Viswanadhan's life has been setting up Cholamandal, the artist village off Madras, an experiment whose news soon spread all over the country. In the same area each artist bought a small plot of land and devoted a fraction of the day to craft and the rest to art.

While Cholamandal has outlived its usefulness to Viswanadhan, he returns to his thatched house there twice every year when he comes to India. His settling in Paris was an unplanned extension ofhis visit there in 1967 for the Paris Biennial in which his works were shown. "Carrying some works under my arms, I went to visit a gallery. They showed interest in exhibiting me and one thing led to another." Viswanadhan, the man who believes that life is a journey, set up his tent in Paris.

And while his base camp hasn't moved for decades, he certainly hasn't stopped wandering -- tracing patterns all over the globe. "The moment I left my home, my journey started and it has never stopped. I don't think I have lost anything. Maybe I've lost a political identity, lost my political rights, but I feel liberated by that. Liberated by time and place. I love travelling. And I am always moving."

A seismic shift in his life came in the 1976 in Germany when he met with a bad accident. "I woke up on the operation table and the doctor said, `Oh you are alive!' And then asked me who I was. The question shook me up so much that I started thinking what would I have been, how would I have been described if I hadn'twoken up that day."

He came back to India and travelled all over the country in an attempt to answer this most fundamental of questions. Taking a camera along on his journeys led to a series of films titled Sand, Ganga, Agni and Vayu, and now the final one for which he has just left Mumbai -- Ether. From the first film also comes a huge works titled Sand. Seventeen large squares of sand from 17 beaches of India are pasted on boards attached together -- fascinating because you see colours and textures of an element that has been typecast into one colour, a golden yellow.

His films are a movement of images on screen, there is no text, no script, no recorded music. Open-ended films which don't decide for the viewer what he should think. "Sometimes you can say things without saying," explains Viswanadhan, "Sometimes silence itself becomes a statement. Statements are considered very loud things. But very often silence can have meaning and you become a painter of slogans. Silent slogans."

At NGMA, CJ Hall,opposite Prince of Wales Museum. Till Nov 30, 1998. Time: 10.00 am to 5.00 pm. Viswanadhan's films will be screened each day at 11.00 am and 3.00 pm till the exhibition ends.