Landscapes that tell the tale of times changing

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. Building up a sense of disturbance rather than evoking mere pictorial escapism, the artist’s Embryo constructs a space of silent and unfathomable devastation.

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 practice reflects his extreme sensitivity to immediate environment, echoing the artist’s attachment to his socio-cultural ethos. He employs landscapes or the natural elements from his surroundings as his principle protagonist to put across his innermost aesthetic proclivities whether in protest, homage or celebration. 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.

In the process, Rajan Krishnan underscores the cyclical forces of creation and destruction as his images continue to oscillate between visions of the present, future and past...