Rajan M Krishnan

Jacoby gives an interesting narrative on the life and works of the Kochi based painter Rajan M Krishnan as he is ready with his first international solo show at Bodhi, New York later this month.

I think that I am here, on this earth,
To present a report on it, but to whom I don’t know.
As if I were sent so that whatever takes place
Has meaning because it changes into memory.
— Czeslaw Milosz, “Consciousness”

As if swathed in a tremulous illusion of sublime karmic Zeitgeist, a ravaged landscape sinks irredeemably into a hell of desolation. The uncanny spell of searing beauty, bedazzling in glorious hues of gossamer frills, now turns into a yawning chasm of pure dread.
 
This imperceptible ontological dualism of pain and pleasure, an impossible synchronicity of primordial archetypes of Jungian collective unconscious and a futuristic Tarkovskian Zone of post-apocalyptic transubstantiation occurring in a single frame of reference is perhaps what makes Rajan M Krishnan’s memory traces of deconstructed landscapes truly mind-boggling. The monumental scale and visual splendour of the staggering panels command a “shock-and-awe” reverence worthy of any huge museum-size exhibit or an eye-catching mural in a public square.

An unruly mop of curly hair and squiggly daubs of beard accentuating his beaming youthful features, the 39-year-old painter retreats to his craggy old cane chair and scans contentedly a fresh 108 x 72 inch panel awash with his signature grey tone acrylic. Wall-mounted in uneven low-light in his studio on St Martin’s Road, Palarivattom, Kochi, in the humid south-west Indian coastal state of Kerala, this premium canvas too, part of his current series of Memoirs, might be destined for foreign shores.

Almost 10 years after his post-graduation in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of MS University, Baroda, Rajan M Krishnan can today tick off an enviable list of rare distinctions: Bodhi Art Gallery, Delhi, chose his four paintings from the Embryo series to represent Bodhi at the Art Singapore, the Contemporary Asian Art Fair, last September. Now, New York Bodhi Gallery is all set to mount his 12 Memoir paintings for a show running from Jan.25 to Feb. 17, 2007. A discreet Spanish collector, reputed to be interested exclusively in Goya and Rembrandt so far, has now inducted the Kerala artist too in the venerable vault. A Cypriot collector, known to own only the French masters, was willing to go into a bidding match just to snatch one of Rajan’s watercolour portraits. His paintings are now with some of the pre-eminent collectors in the Netherlands, Malta, France, the UK and recently China as well. And, well, he would probably shy away from discussing his current price tag!

For a young contemporary Indian artist who had grown up sixth in a family of seven children in a village on the banks of the Nila river, in Thrissur district, Rajan had struggled against great odds in life to reach where he is today. He is hailed as one of the leading young professionals who determinedly opted to stay in Kerala, operating from their own studios in Kochi.

Clinging dearly to his childhood memories of a verdant strip of land, fringed by swaying palms and vast green paddies, with the elegant full-bodied Nila flowing by, Rajan had initially portrayed some idyllic “agri-scapes.” Then, suddenly, it dawned on him: There’s nothing romantic about the old landscape anymore. “During the past 10 – 15 years, Kerala landscape has been extensively ravaged, raped and systematically terrorised. Instead of paddy, concrete and consumerist debris grown in the agri-scapes. Wide-spread decay and disintegration has left only the memory sites,” says Rajan.

As Milan Kundera asserts in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” More than a political polemic and ecological critique of modernity, the blighted landscape called for the elevation of memory to a moral imperative. “We need a frame of reference to document the devastation, and address the issue. It is not only environmental. It’s spiritual, about the psyche of the people and the society.”

Moving from watercolour miniatures, realistic portraits and graphic narratives to brutal close-ups of wasteland blues, Rajan took cues from the neo-realist films, notably the Russian master, Andrei Tarkovsky’s (Stalker, Mirror, Nostalgia), and the neo-expressionists German painters including Anselm Kiefer, penchant for breaking the verbal narrative with visual layers of memories.

Layers of flat, ashen, grey, reminiscent of Goya’s frightening, obscure Black Paintings after the Spanish Civil War, came into play. “When you struggle against a collective amnesia, like the struggle you see in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Hundred Years of Solitude, you have to understand that experience is not linear. Every moment you go through hundreds of layers; you live several lives simultaneously. You take diversions. Many things are imposed on you, especially visually. Thus an act of painting becomes political as the artist selects a particular image. I have to evolve an effective language for interpreting that concept,” Rajan explains.

Enroute, his first solo exhibition in Mumbai, at the Gallery of Modern Art, while graphically alluding to the inner catastrophe unleashed by the cataclysmic changes, evoked spectral imageries in huge, arresting formats. Cosy colours, symmetrically aligned industrial-designs with metallic sheen a la Constructivist geometrical mode, luminous inflorescence of coruscated bronchiole branches, breathtaking clumps of liverworts and mosses, interwoven twigs draped like festoon swags, deep-forked, swallow-tailed hedges, pared shavings and crenellated strands of corals – even the depopulated, dark, burned-out urban lots take on an alien, otherworldly pictorial plash like constellations of strange mirrors in these bizarre landscapes.

Adding new layers of meaning to the unsettling imagery, titles with wider connotations – Apparition, Departure, Trespassing, Eclipse – demarcate more compelling planes of reinterpretation.

The stunning visuals, most of the titles spread over three panels, each measuring 60x36inch, echoed an anguished whisper, hinting at an unseen presence of human despair with a few deft strokes of symbolic embodiments like a rail track, a pole, a fence, a railing.

The upcoming New York show, Memoir, displaying 12 “re-collected and re-created painted documents of personal and shared memories about a region that goes through massive changes” conjures up episodes from “a past that is just a step behind.” Billet, corrugated and rusty; a waste dump of Chest; roofless walls of Domicile; girders standing like sentinels overlooking vast empty fields in Farewell; odd utensils gone to seed in Herbage; flyover tracks in Transition; poles and waste material dumped to the Rim; tapioca stalks of Root, tilted Vessel, fence picket of Transit – each acrylic panel, measuring 108x72inch, denotes a profound quest for deeper meaning.

Surprisingly the visual dialectic of remembering and forgetting transcends all limitations of personal memories. This is exactly what the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera meant when he asserted that “the local is universal.”

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