To begin with, Rajan Krishnan’s works were more realistic and more direct, featuring landscapes typical of his hometown’s topography. While his early life experiences and fond memories of a remote village in his home state Kerala deeply influenced his early works, the sentimental nostalgia gradually gave way to a more critical and hard hitting cynicism, as he started to note the overwhelming and irreversible transitions occurring in his environment.
His hyper-realism draws from a sense of one’s shared inherited histories and the subjects may range from childhood ‘memory’ of local vegetation to imaginary landscapes. Keen to experiment and innovate, his sculptural materials/ constructions are often an extension of his paintings.
Explaining his evolution as an artist, he states, “More recently, I began to become aware of the impact wrought by the forces of change upon it. Both the disintegration of natural decay and destruction caused by the manmade development have hit it simultaneously and unsettled it. More than any outward scar, what this does is leave behind a massive lesion within...”
His painted realm alludes to an altered landscape owing to occupation and subsequent desertion of manmade settings. Instinctive and incisive images of the talented artist depict the rapid disintegration of a serene landscape, caught in a long time warp; a landscape in transition; one he has traversed for long.
His works, which represent a post-agricultural landscape, are quite often fragmentary visions of a dry, sterile landscape. It appears to be an echo of a bygone era that once throbbed with life. There is an unmistakable dark side to them. When idyllic representations are subverted by his artistic perception, the landscape turns into a site of haunted desolation. In alluding to the curious crisscrossing vectors of space and time, the landscape clearly functions as a memorial passage: a recollection of things both imagined and witnessed.
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