It’s a world of darkness; kind of
deadly silence prevails all over. Somewhere it reminds of the rubbles of a
war-torn landscape or the ruins of an ancient city. What we see here is not
what existed here. It is like the portrait of an excavation site of some
ancient civilisation.
These are the immediate feelings that
Rajan Krishnan’s recent paintings evoke. The huge canvases with their dark
colours have an element of primordial memories – memories that got lost in the
ravages of time… memories that the human existence can never part with.
Born in a typical Kerala village with
all those romantic elements of natural beauty and greenery, those landscapes
were sort of creative catalyst for Rajan in the early stage of his creative
pursuit. But in the later stage, what haunted him more was the disappearance of
that natural grandeur.
The kind of ravaged panorama that
appears in his canvas time and again has its roots in the agonies about the
vanishing splendour of the land where he grew up.
“The landscape I traversed infinite
times has been changing,” says Rajan. “Both the slow disintegration of nature
and the rapid destruction caused by new development have hit it at the same
time… More than any external impairment, it causes a massive catastrophe
within.”
The works exhibited in his Mumbai
show, ‘eNroute’, were reflections of the artist who is deeply concerned about
the “change and disintegration happening to a landscape familiar for a long
time”. These works are devoid of the warmth or charm that we expect in a
landscape portrait. Somewhere we feel the cold hands of death trying to clutch
us from behind.
In this age of sound and fury a human
being can never be romantic, Rajan’s works seem to proclaim. When the
contemporary history is marked with the milestones of bloodshed one finds it
tough to be buoyant about his life and times, or even future. In a sense it is
this murky reality of our time that attributes kind of darkness to Rajan’s
paintings.
“Whatever films I have seen, whatever
history I have read have this element of darkness to it. In that context it is
difficult to be optimistic,” says Rajan who believes his personal history is
irrelevant and it should be seen in relation with the history of mankind.
But the recent canvases of this
artist, who is extremely conscious about mankind, are devoid of any human
figures. The barren landscape seems to proclaim death rather than life. Even
the shrubs and the vegetations here and there have no element of ‘life’ in it.
It is almost like the land of the dead as portrayed in Huan Rulfo’s novel
‘Pedro Paramo’.
But at the same time these works say
once the place was throbbing with life. The artist creates human presence with
its absence only; just like the lull pointing to a disastrous storm as we see
in his lonely landscapes. Likewise, though there is no element of greenery here
the grey shrubs also carry within the memories of a time when it was blossoms all
around.
However, there was a phase when Rajan
experimented with human figures before the dark side of the landscape started
appearing in his canvas. The show ‘Little Black Drawings’ was a selection of
charcoal drawings that portrayed many faces of humanity. But here again there
was the overwhelming loneliness and the movement to darkness that engulfs our
time and history.
And this darkness together with the
immobility is the result of a perception that anything can happen any time. He
is freezing time in his frames. History comes to a standstill here.
Time, for Rajan, is a not a linear
concept. He is trying to break that common perception. The lack of mobility in
these canvases should be seen in connection with his notions about time. “I
disagree with compartmentalisation of time,” says Rajan Krishnan. “I look at
time from 39 years back; from the moment I was born.” This he links to the
multilevel consciousness of humanity. According to him “we live in many
centuries” thus breaking all the linear perceptions of time.
At an instant when we are deprived of
memories the mission of art is to recreate it, he says. The latest project that
he has undertaken is kind of recreating those ancient memories. A huge
sculpture project with thousands of tiny statuettes, this is an attempt to
capture the memories of a past that we have seen in the pages of history.
The uniqueness of Rajan’s work is that
while they communicate with the phase we pass through it is rooted in ancient
age far beyond the reaches of history and recollection. The past is a recurring
presence here. The ancient and the modern come together in these frames and we
cannot isolate one from the other. This artist excavates future from the
rubbles of the past.
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